Benchmarking my MacBook's Temperatures

[Ichabod.]

I am planning on replacing the thermal compound on my Late 2008 2.0 GHz 13" Unibody MacBook to see what kind of effect it has on my operating temperatures.

I hope to benchmark my 'idle' and 'under load' temperatures, but I'm wondering what would be the best way to test 'under load.'

I don't really have any graphically intensive games on this HDD, but would encoding a video be sufficiently stressful to provide a good benchmark?

Are there any standard programs that can be used to simulate a load on the CPU/GPU?

 

[Intell]

Try this: http://www.bresink.com/osx/SystemLoad.html

 

[Ichabod.]

Try this: http://www.bresink.com/osx/SystemLoad.html

Thanks, it worked pretty well. I played ~8 videos on two screens in the background to try to simulate stress on the GPU. This seems to have produced some decent load temp readings.

I'll have to make a thread to document my before and after.