Should I burn-in a new PC?

Yes. Infant-mortality failures (bad RAM, weak PSU, marginal cooling, faulty cables) almost always show in the first 24-72 hours under sustained load. Running a burn-in surfaces them before your return window closes.

How long should burn-in run?

Browser-based burn-in is limited to short bursts because we can't open a kernel-level monitor. This wizard runs ~2 minutes and exercises every subsystem. For deeper soaks, follow up with Prime95, FurMark, and MemTest86 — but use this first to spot obvious failures.

What does a failed burn-in look like?

CPU benchmark scores half what the chip's spec says. WebGL drops below 60 fps almost immediately. Memory allocation fails far below your RAM size. Storage writes < 10 MB/s. Any of these on a new build means RMA before your window closes.

Wizard / W04

New PC burn-in.

Stress every part of a freshly built or bought PC. We torture CPU, GPU, memory, and storage, then give you a build-validation report you can keep as a baseline.

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Manual follow-ups browser cannot measure

Temperature monitoring

Open HWiNFO64 (Windows) or iStat Menus (macOS) on a second monitor / phone. Watch CPU package + GPU temps during the burn-in. Sustained > 95°C = cooling problem, address before the return window closes.
Voltage / PSU sanity

If the PC reboots or crashes during the burn-in, the PSU is the prime suspect on a new build. Cheap or under-spec PSUs fail under transient load — swap before assuming the GPU is faulty.
Cable check

After the burn-in, with the PC off, re-seat every internal cable: 24-pin, EPS 8-pin, GPU PCIe, SATA / M.2 latches. Vibration during shipping unseats connectors.

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