Concerning computers, system stability testing is a way of measuring the “health” of your PC. This is usually performed by experts (technicians, etc) and is not recommended to be performed quite frequently either. Because system stability testing involves putting a lot of stress on your hardware, even if you have a never PC, running it somewhat frequently can do some damages to the hardware.

But as said, in some occasions it can be quite useful to “locate” the faulty hardware (for instance), etc. Now under platforms like MS Windows we have a lot of both free and paid utilities but in GNU/Linux there aren’t that many around.

In that case, as a GNU/Linux user if you’re searching for a CPU based system stability tester and  a benchmark tool (originally developed for CPU “over-clockers!”) then you should try “systester”. It’s a completely free, open-source, cross-platform utility that also supports Windows and Mac OSX in addition to the default GNU/Linux support.

But as mentioned in the title, this is a simple utility that puts stress on your CPU mostly (including RAM too) and won’t let you test your HDD or optical drives for instance. So please remember that.

Main features …

*. Stresses your CPU by using Pi (“π”) based calculations up to 128 million bits (you can also manually load a “Pi” file to be used for the calculation as well).

*. Supports up to 32 threads.

*. Runs up to 50 times.

*. Compare the results.

*. Gives you warnings if anything goes wrong (useful for isolating hardware related issues) and hashchecking.

*. Supports both “Borwein” (an algo that calculates the value of “1/π” and “Gauss-Leg” algorithms.

*. Shows some of your hardware details such as: CPU type, manufacture, OS and installed RAM, etc.

*. Save output to a log file (disabled by default).

*. Manually “Stop” the benchmarking process.. are some of its main features to mention.

You can install “systester” in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 (as long long as you have Qt 4.4 or never) by first downloading the zipped file from this “systester” home page (which includes packages for other OS platforms too).

For Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux users  …

If the download section confuse you, under “Linux i686/x86 binaries” just look for a package called “Generic Build” simply click on it to download.

Then simply extract the content to somewhere (say to your desktop for instance). Then go into that folder and locate a file called “systester” and simply double click on it and it should openup the program window!.

This is the best thing about “systester”. You don’t have to install it thus can be used as a portable app as well.

So if you’ve been looking for a CPU based (somewhat simple when considering its features) portable system stability and benchmark utility that can be used in Ubuntu (GNU/Linux in general), MS Windows and Mac OSX, then “systester” will come in quite handy for you (hopefully ). Enjoy!.