Hi,
> Yeah on windoze boxes I run prime95 in conjunction with speed fan and
> push the system to 100% processing power. Is there a Linux equivalent
> of this? Or a tool that can be run from a live Distro I'm intrigued 
> :)
I've used stress before to chew up a known amount of RAM. I haven't 
used it to diagnose hardware problems.
$ aptitude show stress
Package: stress
New: yes
State: not installed
Version: 1.0.1-1build1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/devel
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@???>
Architecture: i386
Uncompressed Size: 76.8 k
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7)
Description: A tool to impose load on and stress test a computer system
  'stress' is a tool that imposes a configurable amount of CPU, memory, 
I/O, or
  disk stress on a POSIX-compliant operating system and reports any 
errors it
  detects.
  'stress' is not a benchmark.  It is a tool used by system 
administrators to
  evaluate how well their systems will scale, by kernel programmers to 
evaluate
  perceived performance characteristics, and by systems programmers to 
expose the
  classes of bugs which only or more frequently manifest themselves when 
the
  system is under heavy load.
Linpack which is a component of the HPC Challenge is the classic test 
in high performance computing and is known to chew up the power. It 
needs ATLAS and an MPI implementation as dependencies.
$ aptitude show hpcc
Package: hpcc
New: yes
State: not installed
Version: 1.4.1-2
Priority: extra
Section: universe/science
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@???>
Architecture: i386
Uncompressed Size: 1,581 k
Depends: libatlas3gf-base, libc6 (>= 2.7), libopenmpi1.3, 
mpi-default-bin
Description: HPC Challenge benchmark
  The High Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge benchmark runs a suite 
of 7
  tests that measure the performance of CPU, memory and network for HPC 
clusters.
  Amongst others, it includes the High-Performance LINPACK (HPL) 
benchmark, used
  by the Top500 ranking (
http://www.top500.org/).
Homepage: 
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/
Cheers,
Chris Edsall
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