If you get blue screen or automatic restart while playing games, recording using CCTV or using any intensive graphics software such as AutoCAD/Photoshop, very likely you have a faulty graphics card. There can be other reasons as well but the first thing you should check is your graphics card. It is obvious that when playing game, your Nvidia, ATI or other brand of graphics card will be working extra harder to render images to the screen.

Here is a free and useful tool to stress test your video card’s memory for stability.

Video Memory stress Test allow you to completely test your video RAM (accessible to DirectX). The best way to check stability after overclocking.

Test graphics card software

Even if you don’t overclock your video card, you can still use it to test the stability of your graphics card. If your video card that is not overclock can’t survive one full cycle of memory stress test, you should have it changed. This free tool is programmed by Misha Cherkes, the same programmer of Check Flash (ChkFlsh) that is used to check and test USB flash drives.

I have a pretty old NVIDIA 256MB GeForce 6600 LE video card on my desktop. The video memory stress test tool estimated that the 254 full test will complete in a whopping 5 hours! However, the stress test only took 21 minutes on my laptop which uses ATI Mobility Radeon X700 with 64MB ram. Modern video cards with hundreds of megabytes can take up many hours just to do the full test. In this case, you can select either Small or Express test from the program.

Small test does not test memory with walking bits. As for Express, it performs test with all patterns, but process only random 15% of created surfaces. “Small” test set is good for quick check of overall memory integrity and “Express 15%” is better for quick stability test after overclocking.

There are 2 ways to run video memory stress test tool. You can run it in Windows, which in my opinion is not so good because there might third party programs running in background that can interfere with the stress test. The better way to run this tool is in clean environment which directly works with video ram without using any interfaces and drivers from Windows. An ISO file is provided in the archive for you to burn it onto any CD/DVD disc. If you can’t boot from CD/DVD, you can use the floppy disk version. Just download the floppy version, extract and run install.bat.

Simple, useful and free tool to stress test a video card for stability.

[ Download Video Memory Stress Test | Floppy version ]


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