Best Way to Stress Test Your System: Prime 95?

[AGodspeed]

Title says all.

My Rig:

Athlon T-bird 1.4 GHz
MSI K7 Master
VisionTek GeForce3
Quantum Fireball 40.0 GB @ 7200 RPMS
Win98SE

Thanks in advance. 🙂

 

[John]

Yes, run Prime95 torture test for ~24hrs and RC5 for TA 24/7.

 

[JC]

So it won't work if you crack RC5 for other than TA, John?? 😉

 

[GoSharks]

run prime95, RC5, seti@home, and <insert your favorite 3d game here> all at the same time 😀

... yes im serious 🙂

 

[AGodspeed]

And how do I know if my system is really stable. 48 hours of torture testing or what? How do I know if my system has failed, I'm going to leave it on tonight for the next 9 hours or so.

Thanks.

 

[xtreme2k]

You know your system has fail the prime test if the Prime95 tray icon has turn yellow 🙂

 

[Mats]

"...prime95, RC5, seti@home..."


Where can I d/l this stuff?

 

[flood]

<< "...prime95, RC5, seti@home..."


Where can I d/l this stuff? >>



you could start here 😉

prime95
rc5

 

[Wind]

24 hrs of Prime95 should be sufficient.

 

[Mats]

Hey flood5 good buddy, maybe you could tell me how to search AT forums for something I want to download, I must be an idiot. 😉

Thanks for the other links but. 😎

 

[sharkeeper]

I actually prefer to see Prime95 run for about 144 hours with no errors. Unplug all the case fans (but not the CPU fan! hehe) if it's not in the summer. Or turn off your A/C in the summer. Many systems that are "stable" now will not be stable in warmer months. Sometimes it only takes [a reduction of] 20 MHz to make a system 100% stable. If you must absolutely ring every MHz out of your cpu you need regulated thermal management which is out of reach for 99% of users. Nor is it practical for a pc.

I recommend only running one application at a time as they all share cpu use. If you run RC5 or SETI and Prime95 you will see that Prime95 completes the iterations much slower. You can also start Prime95 with higher priority. (Windows NT only)

Some people prefer a program called CPU Stability Tester.

Then there is just the unexplainable:

I have a KG7 RAID that frequently produces "texture nnn.dds is corrupt" messages in 3DMark 2001. Sometimes it doesn't make it past Dragothic in the benchmark! Even underclocking the system will cause the error! The system has run for weeks of Prime95 TT and CPU stability tester without a hitch. This is both overclocked, default frequency, and underclocked! Memtest86 did ten passes with no errors. (2048MB Corsair ECC memory) I just don't get this crap. It should be called maduser instead of madonion because it sure can be frustrating. Doesn't really matter anyway as 3DMark is just a box of Crayola for the CPU/GPU to scribble junk on the screen and drum up some useless number at the end anyway. It's the accuracy of my projects is what counts and that they are done on time! 🙂


Cheers!

 

[ahfung]

Looping 24 hours of Prime95 torture test is only the first step. If it doesn't crash the next step will be playing your favorite games for a few hours.

I had Prime95 looped for over 24 hours but still got some random applications crashes (e.g. Outlook Express, Clone CD crashed) and BOSD in Ghost Recon. Reverting the memory to Fast CL2 (from Ultra CL2) solved all the problems. In fact, Prime95 isn't very sensitive when one has a good amount (e.g. 256 or 512MB) of overclocked or outside spec memory.

 

[flexy]

that doesnt make sense 🙂


since prime has very low cpu priority by default it will eat less cpu time as soon there is something else running with it.

If you only run prime..then it uses like 98% or higher of your cpu...and this wont change if you run a dozen Castle Wolfenstein's in the background...very likely even get LOWER cpu usage since games or other apps may use less cpu cycles than prime does.....except of course you would set prime's priority very high.....but i dont think theres a point in running more stuff with prime...

 

[Rahminator]

Guys, those programs really suck for testing stability... really. burnk7.exe from cpuburn will raise temps a few degrees higher than Seti, folding, prime95 or any game ever could. It will make your 5V line drop lower than you've ever seen it at. If you run this program for 24 hours without any reboots/errors, your system is truly stable.

[Edit] Don't do any combos with this app. If you do, the other program will get 50% of the cycles and those 50% will let the CPU relax a bit. This is the only program that should be running on your machine when you're burning it in.