Strange P95 behaviour

[palladium]

My rig ( below) has been behaving quite strangely lately ( mostly two task manager pops up during startup instead of one - I did edit the registry to start taskmgr during startup though), so as part of the investigation I did a P95 small FFT test. Strangely, after 30 mins, I realised that one of the (virtual) cores did only 7 instances of 10K ( instead of 8). I left it running for 8 hours, no other problems ( the above problem only happened once).

Now, I am confident that my RAM is stable ( running it at or below its rated speed and timings), and FWIW this rig passed 30 passes of LinX ( 2 instances to load all 8 threads) on the same settings.

Do I have an unstable CPU, or should I start thinking of other things ( ?virus).

Thanks in advance.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've had that happen too, P95 doesn't do the same number of tests on both cores. Not sure why, other than perhaps one of the CPU cores had additional load on it, slowing it down.

I don't think that it's anything to worry about.

 

[Idontcare]

Could also be thermal throttling sporadically kicking in (unbeknownst to the user) and slowing down the overall number of computations that occur on one core versus another over the duration of 8hrs.

Anandtech reported this exact cause-and-effect with Prime95 in this article:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...howdoc.aspx?i=3184&p=4

It looks as though Core 1 is having trouble keeping up with the other three