Need game to stress low spec machine

As part of a BTEC assignment for some students I have asked them to customise a vanilla install of WinXP SP2 to act as a gaming machine.

The machines are fairly low spec (1 GHz PIII and 128 Mb RAM if I remember correctly, with onboard ATI graphics.) I will be able to post proper specs on Monday if strictly needed.

What I now need is for some recommendations of free or trial games that can be downloaded to test the 'before' and 'after' versions of the machine to see if their optimisations have acheived anything.

I am guessing that we need games that stretch available RAM and stress the CPU - something A* pathfinding related or similar or a tech demo that loads the screen up with lots of physics objects until the machine is on its knees.

If it reports 'performance' natively (frames/sec, etc.) then all the better.

Any offers or suggestions ?

Try my old jetscream game (free 3 level playable demo) it was written on a duron 800 XP 128mb and an intel 82815GPU you will need to run setup and turn off all the detail except water reflections.

It will certainly stress your machine but will be 'playable' you can then increse the stress level by increasing resolution/detail etc

www.d-grafix.com

Hmm, I guess you need games that test the CPU out not the GFX card...That machine isn't that bad so really any game that stresses the CPU out is probably designed with mega graphics too (which is where the bottleneck would be) so wouldn't be a great test unless you stuffed a gfx card in that could handle everything fine.

Well, our racer is CPU intensive- the graphics actually don't push as hard as the physics do :) I imagine it'd push alot of memory around too due to the same issue that we had to code around with physics.

Try here:

http://www.kineticrealities.com/RacerM.zip

Supreme Commander hammers my system to burgery and back, try that on their machines.

@Dan: cheers - sounds like a good match and will hopefully show the difference between an untuned and optimised system

@Cygnus: excellent - exactly the kind of thing I was talking about

I will give both of these a workout and report back (eventually) when the students have done their stuff.

I am not sure Supreme Commander will install on these PCs, but no harm in downloading a demo and giving it a go.

I have been swamped by teaching-related work recently and not had much time to hang out here - but I knew I could rely on you guys to help out... Keep them coming !