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I run MemTest86 a lot at work on customer's machines, and it's great for troubleshooting memory issues. My question is, how can I test that a GPU is starting to go?

I know of programs like 3DMark to push the graphics card to its limits, but what about with Video Memory? Is it worth testing? Is there a stress tool actually able to catch issues in the video card (memory), perhaps using CUDA/OpenCL?

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(in my opinion) I think a stress test would do the trick, because if it is going bad it would either fail or not meet the benchmarks for that kind of card - but, if anyone can find a utility for this, I would be interested as well. – ekaj Aug 1 '12 at 19:54
@ekaj I actually just had a customer's computer in with 2 GTX670s in SLI, and it passed the benchmarks, but still kept freezing the computer when just running every day applications like IE9 and Microsoft Word. When I switched out just ONE of the cards, the pair worked great – Luke Aug 1 '12 at 19:57
That's really weird - afterwards, did you separately test that card in a different computer? – ekaj Aug 1 '12 at 19:58
No, we gave the customer back one of his working cards and a new one off the shelf that wouldn't crash. We will be testing the other one in a new system, but need a big one first to handle it – Luke Aug 1 '12 at 19:59
@Luke - I always test the cards individually for just this reason, and that approach has worked pretty well. – Shinrai Aug 1 '12 at 20:07

1 Answer

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GPU stress tests are generally designed to attempt to overheat the GPU. Depending on the particular test, this might or might not use the entire video memory or check its integrity at some point.

Video Memory stress Test is specifically designed for this purpose, and it's quite similar to MemTest86+. You can test the memory using DirectX, CUDA or OpenGL.

The downloadable zip contains VMT (for Windows) and VMTCE (Clean Environment, bootable ISO). There's also a floppy version.

Screenshots

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There is also sourceforge.net/projects/cudagpumemtest which I use under Ubuntu 12.04 – math Aug 10 '12 at 10:09

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