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Hardware Testing

B

b4u

Golden Member
Hi,

After I get my new system (in the next couple of days, I hope), I'm gonna test it the best way I can.

I heard about the following software:

Prime95, Gold Memory, Memtest86, CPUz, WinCPUID.

CPUx and WinCPUID give info about the machine (CPU, memory, ...)

Gold Memory and Memtest86 make some testing on memory.

Questions:

[1] But what about Prime95? What does it test?

[2] Which software should I use? All of them?

[3] What is the best way to test a P4 2.4c CPU, since it has "2-in-1" processors? Does a test on the CPU only tests is partially?


Thanks
 
Prime95 is not a hardware test application. It's function is to find prime numbers. Some people at one point thought that since it uses a lot of CPU power, it was useful for testing CPU stability. However, finding prime numbers does not neccesarily test the CPU very well. Prime95 does almost all it's work on the floating point unit of the CPU. It does not necessarily test the integer unit of the CPU very well at all. Considering that most applications rely much more heavily on integer math that floating point math, I really don't think it's a very good CPU test.
 
Originally posted by: notfred
Prime95 is not a hardware test application. It's function is to find prime numbers. Some people at one point thought that since it uses a lot of CPU power, it was useful for testing CPU stability. However, finding prime numbers does not neccesarily test the CPU very well. Prime95 does almost all it's work on the floating point unit of the CPU. It does not necessarily test the integer unit of the CPU very well at all. Considering that most applications rely much more heavily on integer math that floating point math, I really don't think it's a very good CPU test.
Click to expand...

Interesting info there, but from my limited experience in overclocking, if Prime95 fails, something else will crash eventually. And, I've never had a crash due to overclocking when Prime95 passed. So, it has worked as a stability indicator for me, but that's just my experience.

Question[1]: notfred answered this pretty well.

Question[2]:
First, I'd say use Prime95 at stock speeds just to make sure things are stable before you overclock. Then try overclocking bit by bit and testing again with Prime95. Once you've found your max stable overclock, increase just to the point of instability and run MemTest86. If MemTest86 passes, then your CPU is maxed but your memory still has room to go. If MemTest86 fails, then your memory is limiting you. I'm not familiar with Gold Memory to comment on that.

Question[3]:
I don't know.
 
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