Using Prime95 for stress testing is wrong!

[VBboy]

I noticed that a lot of you guys use Prime95 for stress testing. Well, it's the wrong program to use for that purpose. Even in the Readme.txt it says that the program only tries to utilize "free" cycles and not overload the system. It runs as a very low-priority process and doesn't slow your system down if you go and play Quake3 or something like that.

It is a great program to use if you need to check if your OC'ing worked (because it flags hardware errors which are likely to be oc'ing-related). However, for real stress testing you should run a 3d benchmark that supports SOFTWARE rendering so that your GeForce3 can rest and the CPU can do all the hard work and sweat like crazy.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[dowxp]

i believe stress testing is just working on your comp. if your comp doesnt crash while playing games, surfing, then its fine.

 

[VBboy]

Bangsailio, you are kind of wrong
You need to stress-test to make sure your PC won't crash when it gets a couple of degrees hotter in the room or when you decide to run a few programs at once that you haven't run before.

That's why they always stress-test (burn-in) computers at good companies like Dell

 

[dowxp]

haha, i understand the point, but...

i dunno, if it runs well under my parameters, then it should be fine. doesnt matter however, im 24/7 rc5 cracking.

 

[dowxp]

<< You need to stress-test to make sure your PC won't crash when it gets a couple of degrees hotter in the room or when you decide to run a few programs at once that you haven't run before.

>>



programs never run before have no relationship to stability. also, room temperature is a variable, you should test stability under a constant temperature. a overclocked completely stable 1.6 TB @ 18c room wouldnt be stable if the room temp was 50c.
edit: for clarity

 

[TunaBoo]

I use it for intial error testing.

99% of the time if you OC to high, prime 95 will report an error.

You dont use it to test GPU OCing. But for RAM and CPU, it will tell you 99% of the time if it is going to crash during real use.

You make sure it is stable in prime95, THEN you use the computer to play 8 hours of CS straight. If it passes, you be stable

 

[VBboy]

You can run more than one instance of Prime95 if you want to by simply copying the entire directory where it is installed to another location. You can then run it from that dir.

 

[MCS]

I like to let Prime95 run its full 14 hour Self Test before I am happy. 99.9% it will pick up an unstable overclock in the first hour though.