PRIME Don't Place Much Faith In It?

[Markfw]

I agree with Duvie. The only other thing that seems to be required, is one hour gaming WHILE F@H is running. If you can do that, you are stable. Thats based on my 12 boxes.

 

[aka1nas]

Yeah, Prime or Orthos are usually just my preliminary round of stress testing. Once I can get it to pass these, I move on to real applications or multiple simultaneous benchmarks as I mentioned previously.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Duvie
I can give you one the other way...Had mysterious reboots, BSOD...system wasn't stable for more then 3-5 hours...Even taken back to all stock settings would still eventually BSOD about same 3-5 hours....

Do not put all you eggs in one basket and solely trust this application. this isn't my only story...I had a P4 that couldn't finish a 3 hour encoding yet passed prime testing for 24 hours. ultimately it had something to do with memory timings or chipset timings....

I think it is a good cpu tester. However I don not think it is a good system tester, memory tester (Better with AMDs and the integrated memory controller) , or power tester.

Beyond cpu stressing I dont really care for this app.

Well, it makes sense that it is not the most heavy-duty stress-tester for P4 CPUs. Since Prime uses primarily FPU (AFAIK) operations, and the FPU is the part of AMD CPUs most likely to fail first, then it makes sense that it is a good stress-tester for AMD chips. Intel P4, OTOH, have the double-clocked ALU, so integer operations are the better stress-testers for P4. Something like a video encoder is likely a better stress-tester. As you saw.

 

[Roguestar]

The "load level" option in Intel TAT seems to have quite an effect, nothing heats up my CPU like it, it gets the cores hotter than orthos small FFTs.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Originally posted by: Duvie
I can give you one the other way...Had mysterious reboots, BSOD...system wasn't stable for more then 3-5 hours...Even taken back to all stock settings would still eventually BSOD about same 3-5 hours....

I ran orthos blend for near 24hours without incident at the OC'd speed...thought fine!! I will go back to working....3 hours into Folding a cpu core and a gpu core I get a BSOD....Ultimately I swapped every part out. CPU, PSU, HDD, video card.....still it would creep up time and time again. Again orthos runs fine for 12+ hours....I then swapped the Gskill HZ sticks for my ballistix memory sticks and 3 weeks later not a peep...

So orthos ran fine yet I still had instability...

Do not put all you eggs in one basket and solely trust this application. this isn't my only story...I had a P4 that couldn't finish a 3 hour encoding yet passed prime testing for 24 hours. ultimately it had something to do with memory timings or chipset timings....

I think it is a good cpu tester. However I don not think it is a good system tester, memory tester (Better with AMDs and the integrated memory controller) , or power tester.

Beyond cpu stressing I dont really care for this app.

agreed, I've been able to pass Prime's memory stress testing yet have had system instabilities due to RAM - confirmed by failed runs of Memtest...

However I have found that Prime is a really good tool for quickly finding your CPU's limits. I think that anyone that doesn't want to believe their results with Prime doesn't want to admit that their CPU isn't as fast as they want to believe - if it isn't at least a couple hours stable you're asking for trouble, otherwise there is little point in having your CPU as fast as you have it overclocked... if you never run into a situation where stability might be a problem, then chances are you don't have any need for the speed in the first place other than bragging rights.

 

[Amaroque]

I used to run Prime as a DC project from '97 to '01. I even ran a PII 350 at 525MHz 24/7 priming (for over a year). I have moved on to other DC projects, and found that I could clock my systems a bit higher (~5% on average)... But most of those computers had to be rebooted at least once a week do to system lockups.

I'm not going to give you an opinion, just my experience here. Everyone here owns there own system. You decide how much stability factors into your computing experience.