Ranking 5 of the most punishing PC workloads

With much of the mainstream hype around PC hardware being centered on gaming GPUs, CPUs, and SSDs, it’s sometimes easy to forget that gaming isn’t the only thing a powerful PC can do. Countless users build a PC to run professional workloads, scientific simulations, benchmarks, and other intensive tasks.

While some games can really stress your hardware, there are way heavier workloads that can bring your PC to its knees. Here I will try to rank, from the lightest to the heaviest, 5 such punishing workloads you can run on your PC.

5 AAA gaming

Some games can melt your GPU

Well, they can’t literally, but that’s what it can feel like running some of the most graphically intensive games on your PC. Gaming is not the most resource-intensive workload if you consider the entire PC. Your GPU bears the bulk of the load, while the CPU is chilling in the background in most scenarios. Modern CPUs are designed to run hot, requiring decent cooling hardware even for gaming, but they’re not overly stressed by any standard.

Casual gaming, on the other hand, is a breeze for most modern gaming PCs. Playing a side-scroller, rogue-like, puzzle, or racing game is unlikely to put pressure on your hardware, whereas an AAA story-based, action-adventure, or RPG title can demand the most out of your powerful PC. Still, in most cases, you can easily get by with a decent air cooler or budget liquid cooler for your CPU. As for your GPU, you should have a decent cooler and plenty of airflow in the case.

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4 Video editing and streaming

Both the CPU and GPU come into play

Video editing is one of the most widespread non-gaming workloads you’ll encounter. Using programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Da Vinci Resolve usually requires a well-balanced PC with enough CPU and GPU horsepower to account for every use case. Your GPU might not always be under sustained load while editing 4K or 8K videos, but your CPU cores will be loaded pretty much all the way.

Unlike most games, video editing is a multi-threaded workload, and can take advantage of all the CPU cores it can get. Hence, high CPU temperature and CPU usage are common during video editing as well. You should also have plenty of RAM if you’re editing high-resolution videos, with 32GB being the sweet spot, and 64GB ideal for professionals.

If you stream games, your GPU is called upon for both rendering the game and encoding the stream. Hence, high CPU and GPU usage during streaming is usual.

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3 3D rendering and animation

Real-time rendering is compute heavy

If you’re an animator or 3D designer, you’ll know that programs like Blender, Cinema 4D, Lumion, and Adobe After Effects require a beefy rig. Rendering realistic graphics and animating complex 3D scenes can put significant strain on your CPU as well as GPU. You also need enough RAM to handle more and more sophisticated projects.

Compared to gaming and video editing, 3D rendering is much more computationally intensive, and might require a professional-grade setup if you don’t want to wait for hours and hours. Needless to say, your CPU and GPU temperatures can easily reach high temperatures of around 85-90℃, but with adequate cooling, these temperatures are perfectly fine.

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2 AI and ML tasks

Readying large datasets takes its toll

Training large language models (LLMs) and running machine learning tasks on an industrial scale is the forte of data center chips like the ones Nvidia is famous for selling, so doing this on your PC is going to need some serious chops. Of course, you’ll adjust for the difference in hardware, but experimenting with AI and ML tasks on your PC for sustained periods can still stress your hardware.

While your GPU will bear most of the load during the training stage, the CPU is useful during the inference stage. So, you can’t ignore one or the other when building a PC for AI and ML workloads. Another thing to remember is that most AI workloads won’t put a sustained load on your hardware, but instead feature bursts of high CPU and GPU usage. However, if your PC is dedicated to a particular AI/ML workload, the toll on your hardware can be significant over time.

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1 Benchmarks and stress tests

The most punishing of all

It might be surprising to some, but benchmarks and stress tests are perhaps the heaviest applications you can run on your PC. These synthetic tests simulate unrealistic workloads that you’ll rarely encounter in day-to-day usage, but they’re helpful in uncovering system instability and scoring system performance on a standardized scale.

Programs like Furmark, AIDA64, Cinebench, and Prime95 are popular benchmarking software that can bring your system to its knees pretty quickly. Some users have even reported that Furmark damaged their GPUs. These tools can result in extremely high temperatures for your CPU and GPU, depending on the software you’re running.

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Your PC can handle more than you think

It’s always recommended to prevent overheating your computer to avoid lasting damage to your components, but often, the dangers of high temperatures are overblown. CPUs and GPUs are designed to run fine even at temperatures of around 95℃, so as long as you’re not exceeding those numbers regularly, you’re going to be fine.

And when you’re aware of which workloads are the most punishing for your PC, you can always prepare ahead by investing in the best CPU cooler in your budget.