How to test your CPU / memory with LinX

If you are experiencing random blue screens or crashes within x264 (your crash log will show something like "This crash appears to have occured in the 'c:\program files (x86)\obs\libx264-136.dll' module) or other modules, please perform the following test to ensure your CPU and memory are working correctly.

WARNING: If you are overclocking or have a faulty / low quality CPU cooler, testing with LinX can cause your CPU to overheat. With modern CPUs this should not cause any damage, but please be aware that we accept no responsibility for any damaged hardware. If in doubt, run a hardware monitor alongside LinX and abort the test if temperatures exceed 90c.

1. Download LinX from https://obsproject.com/downloads/LinX.zip

2. Extract the LinX folder to your desktop (or similar).

3. Run LinX.exe. You should see something like the following screen:


4. Press "Settings" and set the threads to your CPU thread count. Eg, if you have an Intel i5 CPU, set this to 4. If you have an Intel i7 CPU, set this to 8.


5. Press 'All', set 'Run' to '10 minutes', then press Start.


You will see the elapsed time increase, but nothing else may appear to happen. The testing process can take a while to show results, so please be patient. Your computer may feel sluggish while the test is running, this is normal. Note that if you have a large amount of RAM to test, it may take more than 10 minutes for a single pass to complete, in which case you should set "Run" to "5 times" instead of using the time limit.

6. Once the testing is finished, you should see a screen like the following if there were no errors.


If there were errors (the test will stop early and indicate an error), your CPU or memory is faulty. If you are overclocking, you need to reduce or remove your overclock to ensure your system is stable.

If you are not overclocking, your RAM may be faulty. Check you are running the RAM at the rated voltage in your BIOS. For a more thorough memory diagnostic, you can try http://www.memtest.org (use the "Auto-installer for USB Key (Win 9x/2k/xp/7)" with an empty USB drive). If you continue to get RAM errors, you will need to replace your RAM or remove the faulty stick.

Please do not post a crash log on the OBS forum if you encounter CPU or RAM errors.

I would like to show my support for this. To users experiencing any sort of "strangeness" with their computer at all, these are generally good things to do.

Additionally, one thing I would especially like to emphasize to streamers is that if you are streaming while playing a game on the same computer, you are really stressing your system, and any previously lurking instabilities almost always will become apparent.

People have this misconception that they are just "streaming their game", but it's more complicated than that. They are gaming (which already uses plenty of graphics and CPU), then they are capturing their image, rendering the image to another graphics renderer (OBS), capturing audio, mixing that audio, mixing that video, downloading the scene off the GPU, then encoding both the video and audio (and encoding is especially CPU intensive). Using OBS while gaming will expose previously unseen instabilities if they are present.

fyi... When I download linx.zip from obsproject.com. Chrome complains about the file being malicious and discards it.

chrome does that for any "non-popular" site. Seriously. They have a whitelist, not a blacklist. If your site is not on that whitelist, chrome will do that for any zip/executable downloaded from that site. It's also near impossible to get on their whitelist as well. So just ignore it.

Run the file through an actual virus scanner if you're worried. Because that chrome thing is complete BS unfortunately.

I personally have no problems with streaming for years now.
Just wanted to do a test for the lolz and perhaps a good comparison for other users?.



i7-2600k @ 4.5 (Water cooled) and 16GB DDR3 Ram.

I have been running the test with recommended setting and its still going on and it's been a hour. Would it hurt it if I stopped the test manually? Or will it not show the results if I do.

Hey, I tried to run the test and followed every single instruction but nothing happened and no report showed, It just keeps going and it doesnt happen to effect anything at all, doesnt even slow my comp down

Maybe your CPU is too old to run AVX instructions, in which case you'll need to try something like Prime95 as a stress test.

Hi, thanks for looking at this.

I ran the test with the exact settings indicated here and Finished without errors, but I still get bsod while streaming.

Normally watch dog error - which is suppose to indicate an issue with my overclock.

Any other tips available?

how to perfectly know my ram is broken or not
becasue this software wont shows me ant error
so, how to confirm is everything ok ?

ablubeti said:

how to perfectly know my ram is broken or not
becasue this software wont shows me ant error
so, how to confirm is everything ok ?

Click to expand...

i'm searching about this topic and found an article about this ram testing thing
as you can see
so tryied memtest and it shows me this type of error



what to do now ?

One of your sticks of RAM is bad. You'll need to remove / replace it.

ablubeti said:

i'm searching about this topic and found an article about this ram testing thing
as you can see
so tryied memtest and it shows me this type of error

what to do now ?

Click to expand...

As R1ch said, one of your sticks is faulty. Remove all sticks but one redo test, if it passes the test, switch your memory stick to the next one and redo the test until you find the bad stick.