Prime 95 question

[Sonikku]

I've heard I should try running prime 95 to see how hot my cpu can go before it croaks. What will happen if I do that do? Would my machine reset? Would it crash? Could it cause damage to the machine? I don't want to risk hurting anything before I try it. I've never used the program before.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Prim95 is a distributed computing project with a stress test built-in.

If your CPU is overclocked, or in a highly thermally constrained environment, it can be useful to stress test it to either test the stability of the overclock, or to ensure that the CPU won't thermally throttle under the loads that you're planning to apply to it.

Assuming that you haven't disabled your motherboard's thermal protections, the worst thing that prime95 could do is cause the CPU to thermally throttle, and/or reveal an unstable overclock, either by crashing itself, or crashing windows.

If you're not testing an overclock or building a in a really SFF case, you probably don't need to bother running it.

 

[Stuka87]

Note that newer versions of Prime95 will make your CPU run hotter than it normally would because it uses AVX, which makes the CPU increase the vCore.

I prefer OCCT with AVX off.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Note that newer versions of Prime95 will make your CPU run hotter than it normally would

This is worth noting also. If you're using a Haswell CPU, the AVX2 instructions that recent versions of Prime95 uses will overvolt your CPU to dramatically increase throughput, but also dramatically increase heat output.