A PowerShell script to test the stability for single core loads. Modern CPUs can adjust their CPU frequency depending on their load, and have mechanism that allow them to clock higher when only one or two cores are loaded ("boost" clock). With this script you can test the stability for each core, which helps you to validate if your Ryzen "PBO" resp. "Curve Optimizer" settings are actually stable. It also works to test Intel's "Active-Core" Turbo-Boost settings.
Double click the "Run CoreCycler.bat" file.
I do not take any responsibility if you damage your computer using this script! Temperatures while using a stress test can become very high, especially if the cooling solution is suboptimal. And although modern CPUs should automatically throttle or shut down if the temperature becomes too high, there's a certain risk of degradation for your chip if it's running at it max temperature for a prolonged period of time. Also, using PBO technically voids the warranty of a Ryzen CPU, so use it at your own risk!
The script itself is a PowerShell script, but it uses other, inlcuded software to do the actual stress testing, for example Prime95 and y-Cruncher. You can also move your own copy of Prime95 into the /test_programs/p95 directory, and y-Cruncher into /test_programs/y-cruncher, if you want to be on the safe side (good choice!), or want to use a dedicated version. However be aware that both programs can change their settings from time to time, so if you include a version that has not been tested with CoreCycler, it may not work as intended or not even start at all.
To download Prime95, go to the official site: at https://www.mersenne.org/download/ To download y-Cruncher, go to the official site at: http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/#Download
CoreCycler also supports Aida64, which however is NOT directly included due to its license. You need to download the >>>Portable Engineer<<< version yourself and extract it into the /test_programs/aida64 folder. It has to be the Portable Engineer version, because the regular "Extreme" edition doesn't support starting the stress test from the command line. To download Aida64 Portable Engineer, go to the official site at: https://www.aida64.com/downloads You can use the trial version for up to 30 days, which should give you enough time to find your stable settings.
This script will run your selected stress test (Prime95, y-Cruncher, Aida64) with only one (or two) worker threads and sets the affinity of the stress test process alternating to each physical core, cycling through all of them. This way you can test the stability of your Curve Optimizer / Active-Core setting for each core individually, much more thoroughly than e.g. with Cinebench or the Windows Repair, and much easier than manually setting the affinity of the process via the Task Manager. It will still need a lot of time though. If, for example, you're after a 12h "prime-stable" setup which is common for regular overclocks, you'd need to run this script for 12x12 = 144 hours on a 5900X with 12 physical cores, because each core is tested individually, and so each core also needs to complete this 12 hour test individually. Respectively, on a 5600X with its 6 physical cores this would be "only" 6x12 = 72 hours.
Unfortunately such an all-core stress test with Prime95 or other stress tests is not effective for testing single-core stability, because the cores cannot boost as high if all of them are stres tested, and therefore you won't be able to detect instabilities that only occur at a higher clock speed. For example, with my 5900X I was able to run a Prime95 all-core stress test for 24 hours with an additional Boost Override of +75 MHz and a Curve Optimizer setting of -30 on all cores. However, when using this script, and with +0 MHz Boost Override, I needed to go down to -9 on one core to have it run stable (on the other hand, another core was still happy with a -30 setting even in this case).
When you start the script for the first time, it will generate a config.ini file, in which you can then change various settings, e.g. which mode the stress test program should run in (e.g. for Prime95 SSE, AVX, AVX2, CUSTOM, where SSE causes the highest boost clock, because it's the lightest load on the processor of all the settings), how long an individual core should be stressed for before it cycles to the next one, if certain cores should be ignored, etc. For each setting there's also a description in the config.ini file.
As a starting point for Ryzen systems you could set the Curve Optimizer to e.g. -15 or -20 for each core and then wait and see which core runs through fine and which throws an error. Then you could increase the setting for those that have thrown an error by e.g. 2 or 3 points (e.g. from -15 to -13) and decrease those that were fine by 2 or 3 further into the negative (-15 to -17). Once you've crossed a certain point however there is no way around modifying the value by a single point up/down and letting the script run for a long time to find the very last instabilities.
By the way, by default it is configured so that only one thread is stressed for each core if Hyperthreading / SMT is enabled, as the boost clock is higher this way, compared to if both (virtual) threads would be stressed. But there is a setting in the config.ini to enable testing with two threads as well.
Q: What does "Set to Core X (CPU Y)" (e.g. "Set to Core 6 (CPU 12)") mean? A: CoreCycler - as the name suggests - cycles through your cores and informs you on which core it is currently running. When Hyperthreading / Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) is enabled, each physical core contains two "virtual" CPUs, effectively doubling the amount of CPUs available to you. Since Cores and CPUs generally start with 0 (zero-based), as seen in the BIOS and in the Task Manager, CoreCycler also uses this format. So "Core 0" means your first core, and "CPU 0" the first virtual CPU. "Core 6 (CPU 12)" respectively means it's running on the 7th core (remember, zero-based!) and 13th virtual CPU.
Q: The core I select in Ryzen Master isn't the same as here! A: Yes, Ryzen Master starts it's core numbering with 1. Only AMD knows why, it's not the industry standard. In the BIOS the core numbering starts with a 0, in Windows Task Manager the CPU numbering starts with a 0, in Intel Extreme Tuning Utility the numbering starts with 0, and therefore also in CoreCycler the numbering starts with a 0. Blame AMD for breaking this naming convention.
Q: My computer crashes when running this program! A: Very likely your Curve Optimizer or Turbo Boost setting is unstable. Change the settings to a higher resp. less negative value (e.g. from -15 to -12) and try again, or lower your Boost Clock.
Q: How long should I run this for? A: Basically as long as you can. If you aim for a "12h prime-stable setup", you'd need to run every single core for 12 hours, which for a processor with 12 cores like the 5900X would sum up to a total of 144 hours of stress testing. Of course, you can also settle for less - that's totally up to you.
Q: Which setting should I use? A: Short answer: all of them. Long answer: I've defaulted this to Prime95 without AVX and AVX2 and "Huge" FFTs. The reason behind this is that this should produce the least amount of heat and therefore the highest boost clock. But you should eventually run all of the tests to make sure that you're really error free. Also switching from Prime95 to y-Cruncher or Aida64 produces different load scenarios, which can prove useful in detecting instabilities. For y-Cruncher, "04-P4P" and "19-ZN2 ~ Kagari" seem to produce the fastest results (even if "20-ZN3 ~ Yuzuki" is described as being optimized for Ryzen 7000 / Zen4).
Q: Why are you using SSE? AVX stresses the CPU much more! A: Yes, AVX/AVX2/AVX512 does stress the CPU more than the SSE mode. However, it is exactly this additional load on the core wich prevents the boost clock from reaching its maximum (because it is temperature and load dependent), and so you can't really detect these edge cases which eventually can cause an error sooner or later. So, while being somewhat counterintuitive, the SSE mode with its lighter load is actually the one that can find stability problems, which tests using AVX/AVX2 simply cannot. On the other hand, not testing the AVX/AVX2 instructions will also not test the transistors associated with these instructions, so you're not "fully" testing your chip. So you should indeed test both scenarios, light load / SEE and heavy load with AVX/AVX2. You can change the mode to SSE, AVX, AVX2 or AVX512 for Prime95 and Aida64 in the config.ini, and for y-Cruncher you can select different test modes which require different instruction sets.
Q: What settings can I change? A: The config.ini contains details and an explanation for each setting, so take a look there.
Q: When starting the tool I see a "FATAL ERROR: Could not access the Windows Performance Process Counter!" message! A: For some stress test programs the script needs to check the CPU utilization to determine if here has been an error. For this, the tool requires the Windows Performance Process Counter (PerfProc) to work correctly. It may have been disabled, you can check this with either lodctr.exe /q:PerfProc or with reg.exe query HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PerfProc\Performance /s and look for a "Disable Performance Counters" entry with a value larger than 0. There are various tutorials on how to re-enable the Performance Counter on the web, here are some links: https://leansentry.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038645792-How-to-Fix-performance-counter-issues https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/performance/manually-rebuild-performance-counters
I've also included a batch file in the /tools/ directory (enable_performance_counter.bat), which should perform all these actions for you, but no guarantees that it will actually work!
Q: When starting the tool I see a "FATAL ERROR: Could not get the localized Performance Process Counter name!" message! A: See above. You probably need to re-enable the Windows Performance Process Counter (PerfProc).
Q: When starting the tool I see a "FATAL ERROR: .NET could not be found or the version is too old!" message! A: This tool requires the .NET Framework with at least version 3.5. You can download it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/install/dotnet-35-windows-10
Q: I have overclocked my RAM and I see errors when running this program, but I'm sure my CPU is fine! A: The errors may actually come from your overclocked RAM and not your CPU directly. Best practice for overclocking is to separately test the memory overclock and the CPU overclock, i.e. test your CPU while your memory runs at stock speeds. After you're sure that both overclocks are stable on their own, you can combine them and check for instabilities again.
Q: My script freezes! It appears to be running but I see no new output! A: PowerShell scripts seem to freeze when you select some text or click with the mouse into the terminal window (which selects the current position of your cursor). Try to hit Return and see if the execution continues. See e.g. here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3204423/long-running-powershell-script-freezes
This script is provided under the "CC BY-NC-SA" Creative Commons license. Or to put it in their words: "This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms."
You are free to: Share - copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt - remix, transform, and build upon the material The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms:
You can find the full license text here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode
And also in the included LICENSE file.
So feel free to share it, modify it and adapt it to your needs, but if you find any bugs, errors or have improvement ideas, please let me know at:
https://github.com/sp00n/corecycler
The licenses of all included programs remain unaffected by this and retain their original, included license!
Happy testing! sp00n