Prime95

Prime95 serves as an excellent CPU benchmarking utility. It performs particularly well with overclockers and system builders and it is capable of making heavy use of a processor's integer and floating point instructions. Furthermore, the software provides full support for multi-core processors, to ensure a successful stress test.

The software is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other operating systems and it is absolutely free. It comes in a ZIP package and you only need to extract an executable file, instead of going through an installation process. The software doesn't have any special requirements, but one should be careful with it, since it puts a great strain on CPUs.

There are several windows to find within the main user interface. Each window consists of a log, for the main threat and for each processor core. The software is mostly text-based, so it doesn't come with impressive graphics like most benchmarking utility. However, most configurations are made by default, for a well balanced stress test. This means that you only need to run the program and choose the "just stress testing" option when prompted, after which you can sit back and watch.

If you are an advanced user, you may choose other tests in the top menus. Despite the software's simple appearance and the lack of options directly on the user interface, it has to be mentioned that Prime95 is quite flexible with its benchmarking capabilities. It places various configuration options at your disposal, for changing the number of threads and worker windows, for setting up boundaries and much more.

When it comes to benchmarking processors, Prime95 is capable of torturing any processor, to achieve accurate results.