Tools to Stress-Test, Push the Limits and Attain a Score for your Setup.
Benchmarking Tools are usually used to test for a fault, test a Cooling Solution, test settings, run concurrently while setting an overclock (especially GPU), score your system against others, or in some rare cases, turn your computer into a heater.
I will go into a few that I have used for ages and am personally familiar with and all are free;
Hyper PI
A simple old program but a good one, it actually descended (or ascended) from Super PI which was the single-threaded version. Hyper PI will send you CPU as orbital as it can go by bombarding it with PI calculated up to the 32nd millionth decimal place (literally).
Care must absolutely be taken though as if the heat sink, thermal paste or something is not connected properly and the CPU heats up way too fast you can absolutely damage if not destroy it (despite auto-throttling). You would be crazy not to start slow and monitor temps.
Hyper PI can be useful to test the CPU especially if you've adjusted boost settings in BIOS and quickly want to see how it responds to Load, or want to heat it up fast to test a new thermal solution, or maybe you would just like to bed it in a new application of thermal paste?
Unigene Series Coming.