Stress Test

shazard

Junior Member
May 30, 2004
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I've just built a new PC (Intel D865PERL motherboard and Pentium 4 2.8E) -- the first one in 5 years -- and I came across a stress test in Intel's Desktop Monitor software. If the computer's working fine, is it necessary/beneficial to run a stress test and, if so, for how long? Does anyone have a lot of experience with this software: Stress Test v1.0 build 1004, 2003 PassMark Software, Intel Desktop Control Center. Any helpful advice will be very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Susie
 

StrangerGuy

Diamond Member
May 9, 2004
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While Intel makes many some of the stable motherboards in the market, however it won't hurt to stress test your system to give you a peace of mind that your system is rock-solid stable. I personally never used or seen the Intel software you mentioned but most of us here prefer to use Prime95 to stress test our system as it is very sensitive to overall system stability.

As for the time needed for stress-testing, for me 24 hours of Prime95 is enough to guarantee a stable system.
 

Gerbil333

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2002
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It's not necessary, but I always do just to ensure that everything is working properly. A machine may appear to be working fine, but there could actually be a minor problem that will only show up after some extreme use. Stress testing will usually make any flaws appear so they can be solved before you're really in the middle of something, such as a game or a video encoding project.

I like to have peace of mind, so I stress test more than most people would. I do 24-30 hours straight with the following running simultaneously:

-Prime 95
-3DMark 2001 running the benchmark in looped mode
-Winamp 5 playing all my music
-Whatever hardware monitoring software came with the mobo

If that goes well, I repeat the 24-30 hour process with this:

-Prime 95
-Tribes 2 or UT2k4 hosting and observing a server with 6 or more bots
-Hardware monitoring software

That pretty much gaurantees stability. I did that to this computer (2500+, A7N8X Dlx 2.0, Corsair 2x256mb TWINX3200LLPT) when I built it 11.5 months ago, and it has never crashed.