Diagnose
It does not slow down. It stops.
Throttling and freezing look similar from the outside and have almost nothing in common underneath. A machine that throttles is protecting itself and still working. A machine that freezes has lost something: power delivery, memory stability, or a driver. Start by telling the two apart.
What the report tells you
Three figures, each with its reading.
Whether it finishes
yes/no
The most useful signal here is blunt. A machine that cannot complete a three-minute run has a stability problem, and no score matters until that is fixed.
Where it stopped
stage
Which stage it died in narrows the field considerably: the processor stages, the graphics pass and the memory stage fail for different reasons.
The curve up to the moment
shape
A machine that was sliding steeply before it stopped was probably overheating. One that was perfectly flat and then vanished was probably not.
The diagnosis
The shape of the curve, read for your case.
01Stops during the graphics stage
Most often the graphics driver rather than the card. A clean driver reinstall is the cheapest first move, and the browser's own crash behaviour is a hint in itself.
02Stops during the memory stage
Worth testing memory properly with a dedicated tool. Instability under memory pressure is a classic sign of a marginal module or an over-optimistic memory profile.
03Stops at roughly the same point every time, after a steep slide
This one is thermal. It is protecting itself and failing to. Stop testing and look at the cooling before you run anything heavy again.
Every class comes with a stated confidence and the measurement’s own noise floor. How the shape is read
Where a browser stops
What it cannot tell you.
- A browser tab is sandboxed, so a hard freeze may take the whole browser with it and leave nothing behind to read. Absence of a report is itself information, but it is not a log.
- It cannot test your power supply, and a failing one is a very common cause of load crashes that no software will ever see.
- It is not a memory test in the proper sense. If the memory stage is where it dies, use a dedicated memory tester overnight.
Which run
Standard, 3 minutes.
Start with the standard run. If a machine is genuinely unstable there is no reason to hold it at full load for eight minutes before you have learned anything.
Both kinds are free. The choice is on the set-up screen.
Questions
Asked in these words.
- Is it safe to stress test a machine that already crashes?
- A browser workload is lighter than a dedicated stress tool and stops when the tab does, so it is a gentler place to start than a power-virus utility. Even so, a machine that freezes from heat should be looked at physically before it is loaded repeatedly.
- How do I tell throttling from a real fault?
- Throttling is graceful: the machine gets slower and keeps working, and the curve slopes. A fault is abrupt: the machine stops, reboots or shows a driver error, and there is often no slope at all before it.
- It only crashes in games, not here. Does that rule out hardware?
- No. Games load the processor, the card, the memory and the power supply together, and a browser test is lighter on all four. A clean result here narrows the field; it does not clear the machine.