BurnInTest - About systems with only 4GB RAM

Overview

4GB of RAM is not really enough RAM to run Windows under any high load situation. This is especially the case if you are using integrated graphics, which generally uses 1GB of RAM. So the amount of RAM left would only be few hundred megabytes just after the system has booted. It is nearly pointless running tests when only a few hundred megabytes of RAM out of 4GB is actually available for testing. Or put another way, 4GB isn't enough RAM for Windows 10/11 to work well anymore and the lack of RAM will lead to swapping to the disk.


Running BurnInTest

If the user runs BurnInTest with low amounts of free RAM, the system will start swapping to the disk once its out of RAM - which is extremely slow. This causes massive performance loss, freezes, timeouts, and eventual crashes. Especially if other tests running at the same time. Shared video memory with integrated graphics can make it much much worse as well. It is kind of pointless to run a RAM test when there is little to no available RAM to test.

If you still need to test RAM, we recommend using Memtest86 instead so there is more available RAM to test with as Windows and background processes are not running.


Related Errors

  • Insufficient system resources to complete test
  • No operations reported in timeout period

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