Maintenance & repair
01 TechPowerUp GPU-Z
GPU-Z is a lightweight program that tells you everything you need to know about your graphics card. It’s a quick, effortless solution to keeping tabs on lots of data in one place. You can check the GPU’s BIOS version, when the card was released, the GPU clocks, and so on. Other metrics revealed by the software include temperature, core frequency, memory frequency, GPU load, and fan speed tracking. Who wouldn’t want this data for free, and always just a few clicks away? www.techpowerup.com
02 CPUID HWMonitor
As the name suggests, HWMonitor is a hardware monitor, and focuses on the health of your PC. The application enables you to take a look at the main health sensors, such as voltage, temperature, fan speed, and so on. It’s a great place to check whether anything is a particular bottleneck if you’re experiencing performance problems. It can help you identify why these issues are occurring, and confirm whether they’re hardware-related. It’s a free, easy-to-use PC doctor, and a big part of our testing suite here at the magazine, too. www.cpuid.com
03 CCleaner
The more you use your PC, the more it becomes cluttered with unused files, settings, and junk, which all combine to slow down your once beautifully fluid machine. Obviously, this is far from ideal, but CCleaner is
specifically designed to fight against the problem. It features a file cleaner to eliminate all the pesky excess for increased speed, a privacy protection tool to remove tracking and browsing data, and a health check to automatically analyze, fix, and tune your PC’s performance. www.ccleaner.com
04 CPU-Z
Here’s a handy tool to reveal extra information about your CPU that Windows usually likes to keep hidden away. CPU-Z can tell you which processor you have, what chipset it uses, which motherboard is installed, and information about your memory, all in an easy-to-use lightweight application. It can be particularly useful for overclockers – even though it isn’t specifically filled with overclocking features, it can help you create a report about your system’s hardware specifications, which you can then use alongside HWMonitor. www.cpuid.com
05 WinDirStat
If your PC is ever tight for space, WinDirStat can give you a helping hand with the matter. It’s always a pain in the backside to figure out what’s clogging up your PC’s storage, but with this application, you get a visual report so you can literally see what’s taking up all the room. Simply put, it is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool, which displays your storage as colourful visual tiles, so you can see where all your space has gone. https://windirstat.net
06 Cinebench
Benchmarking is a great way to compare your rig against another PC’s performance. The results can determine what you are able to get out of your PC and which elements are having the most impact on a game’s frame rates, for instance. Cinebench is a visual benchmarking tool and the built-in leaderboards make it really easy to compare your results. It will give you an idea of whether your CPU is performing adequately compared to similar CPUs, and can give you an indication of how much of an
improvement to performance a newer processor could add to your system. www.microsoft.com
07 CrystalDiskMark
An open-source hard drive benchmarking tool, CrystalDiskMark is used to determine the read and write speeds of your SSD. It measures these speeds in sequential and random positions, with varying numbers of queues and threads. Like all benchmarks, you can use the data generated to compare your machine against other PCs to ensure yours is running up to speed, and that all your drives are operating correctly. https://crystalmark.info
08 Recuva
Deleting the wrong file can give anybody a fright, but what if you do that and then proceed to delete it from the recycling bin, too? First of all: unlucky. Secondly, don’t fret, because Recuva can help recover deleted files for you. When you delete a file on your thumb drive, hard drive, or SSD, the file isn’t necessarily gone instantly. The block of space that the files were taking up has merely been relabeled as “free space” so it can eventually be used to store something else. Recuva can look to see if it’s there, but the longer you leave it, the more likely it is that the file will have gone, so as soon as you accidentally delete something, find it on Recuva ASAP! www.ccleaner.com
09 MediaInfo
Like a lot of these programs, the name kind of gives it away. If you need to find out information about a media file, MediaInfo will do just that. Right-click a video, for instance, and then click MediaInfo, and you can find its technical details all in one place. You can learn about the codec, video bitrate, audio stream, resolution, and FPS, for example. It’s a good method of checking whether a video you’ve rendered has been saved to the correct format. https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo
10 FurMark
With its OpenGL routine, FurMark will put your GPU through its paces. The aim is to see how your GPU withstands its strenuous benchmarking test, to compare it against others. FurMark is no laughing matter, though, as it’s been known to damage PCs, so take it steady, and make sure your cooling is up to scratch. The website gallery even shows hardware that has been defeated by this app, so make sure you know what you are doing. On the plus side, at least you don’t have to pay for it. http://geeks3d.com/furmark