Hi,

I work on the UK television series, 'The Gadget Show' and I'm looking for a bit of help.

We're going to be testing some laptops, but rather than simply using a range of benchmarking packages, we're hoping to test laptops by running a variety of programmes.

What I'm looking for is information as to what are the most demanding programmes or processes around? The plan would be to start by running a range of low-demanding programmes, gradually leading to the most demanding (I'm thinking games?).

Any suggestions or pointers would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks
Nic Hall
Researcher - The Gadget Show.

The game Crysis is one of the most demanding games out there, at least that's what I hear.

Haven't had an opportunity to play it though.

Also Fallout 3 is pretty demanding in my opinion, or at least for my computer lol.

Welcome to PC Help Forum Nic, I am an avid fan of TGS!

I would tend to agree with the post above, Crysis is a heavy user of (all) system resources and has been the bane of many a gamer trying to squeeze that extra ounce of "prettyness" from this particular franchise. In its day, FarCry2 was exactly the same..almost as if the game came out too early and caught hardware manufacturers on the hop. The latest batch of CPU's (quad and i7) seem to have put paid to these issues now...until the next time.

A perennial CPU hog is Microsoft's Flight Simulator X. Crank that baby up to max all and you'll think you're watching a slideshow.

Away from games, there are applications such as Boinc and SETI that can seriously stress your CPU if you let them. Our very own WCG team uses the former to fight cancer. I believe you can scale up or down the amount of power used by these types of apps. In addition, the 'Intel Burn Test' stability program certainly warms up any CPU (Intel of course) that it comes across.

Here's another couple of games that could stress your CPU;

GTA4 (due mainly to terrible coding)
Tribes2
ARMA2

Thanks for the tips, chaps.

You're welcome.

no prob

Is TGS only available in UK?
If so, do you stream it?
I would tune in for a watch.