Stressxstrain sigmaxvarepsilon curves of a cold worked 1020 steel were measured controlling the strain-rate imposed on the test specimens (and not the testing machine piston or load bean speed), in the range 10-5 less or equal E less or equal 3 s-1. This ample data set, properly treated by a versatile software developed to acquire, filter and present the data in real time, was used to verify the adequacy of several models proposed to describe the strain-rate influence, using an Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithm to fit the models to the ensemble of the measured data. This relatively simple procedure avoids the intrinsic systematic errors associated to the traditional practice of measuring the strain-rate effect on the sigmaxvarepsilon curves controlling the load speed, which may be particularly relevant when testing steel specimens, as their stiffness is many times at least an order of magnitude greater than those of the testing machines.