Prime 95 -- help

[mcurphy]

Well I get an error within 1 minute of running Prime 95 and my PC is very stable.

Does that mean it isn't a reliable program to judge stability? I'm not familiar with the program or any other benchmark or stress testing programs, so I was just wondering if that was a good indication if I could be certain my machine is stable. I plan to overclock soon (first time), so I am going to run quite a few of these programs (sandra, 3dmark) to see if my new system can handle it.

 

[pm]

An error in Prime95 is a bad sign. It means that the CPU is generating incorrect values internally. Admittedly Prime95 is very good at maximally using the CPU's internal resources, but it's still far from the worst-case code that you could run on a CPU.

Doom3 is likely to severely stress hardware. When it's released, if you start crashing don't blame the programmers.