What to do if I get a Prime95 failure?

[Rand3000]

Got a new system I put together Thursday night. I have an Albatron KX18D Pro Motherboard, Athlon Barton 2500+ CPU, and 512 MB of Corsair Value Select PC3200 RAM. I also have a 320W Power Supply. I've overclocked the FSB to 200 MHz and the system is now showing my CPU as a Athlon XP 3200+. The temps are running at 35 for system and 39 for CPU when idle and 36 for system and 52 for CPU when running Prime95.

I ran Prime95 on Thursday night and didn't have any problems. I then ran Prime95 for a couple of hours on Friday evening and when I came back, the log file on c:\ was 113 GB, which had eaten up all of the remaining free space I had.

I then ran Prime95 on Friday night and when I looked at it this morning, it said it ran for 5 hours and 26 minutes and then had a failure.

So my question is what do I do now? Should I lower the FSB and then run the test to see if it was the overclocked FSB that is the problem? If it ran ok the first night and 5 1/2 hours the second night, will the system be ok because I usually don't run high intensive programs like Prime95? I also ran 3dMark2001 and didn't have any problems with it.

 

[BlueWeasel]

It's rare, at least in my experience, for Prime95 to go that long without errors. It doesn't sound like your system is unstable from the overclocking.

What all are you running on that system? A 320W power supply seems a little low if you have alot of drives, fans, etc., especially if it's a generic PSU. It doesn't appear to the PSU though.

Have you tried increasing the voltage?

 

[Rand3000]

I haven't tried increasing the voltage yet. I ran Sandra SiSoftware to see what the voltage is. It shows the CPU Core Voltage rating is 1.650V and the CPU Voltage is 1.62V. What should I increase it to?

 

[BlvdKing]

Prime95 also stresses memory. Keep that in mind if adjusting the CPU vcore doesn't work.

 

[joe2004]

It's rare, at least in my experience, for Prime95 to go that long without errors.

Not really. It just mean he is near the ceiling of his overclock, as far as Prime95 is comcerned. Lower the FSB for just 1 and you will probably be OK with Prime95. I had Prime errors out after 10 hours. I know from experience when Prime95 errors out that my chess programs will do the same so I call that unstable, in my case.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Originally posted by: joe2004

It's rare, at least in my experience, for Prime95 to go that long without errors.

Not really. It just mean he is near the ceiling of his overclock, as far as Prime95 is comcerned. Lower the FSB for just 1 and you will probably be OK with Prime95. I had Prime errors out after 10 hours. I know from experience when Prime95 errors out that my chess programs will do the same so I call that unstable, in my case.

That's interesting. I am not currently running an overclocked system, and I haven't run Prime95 in probably over a year. When some of my systems were not stable from OC'ing, Prime95 would crash relatively quickly.

 

[dguy6789]

a stable system could go unlimited time in prime 95, mine can anyway, i did it for a month once.

 

[joe2004]

i did it for a month once.

Wow, man that means you use your PC only for a Prime95 for a month? That is called overclocker!

 

[DarkTXKnight]

Hey guys I had the same issue only with an Albatron kx600 pro, 512 mushkin pc2700 ram, and xp2200 cpu.... I ran prime 95 and it errored almost immediately... what can I do?? the PSU is Antec smartpower 300W and I only have a bfg fx5600 ultra video, WD 160 GB hdd and Nec 1300a DVD drive..... Do I need to increase something??? this mahcine is for my neighbor.

 

[Boogak]

If a computer is 100% stable, Prime95 will never fail even if you run it for months. I'm a huge stickler for stability so I whenever I overclock, I always run Prime95 for a couple of days non-stop. I've had failures popup after a day or so and I would either bump the FSB down or up the voltage and I'd be able to run it again w/o errors for days. Even if a system is not overclocked, a failure in Prime95 means it is not 100% stable. It could be a problem with memory timings, power supply problems (I've had Prime95 crap out on me on a stock1600+ Palomino when used with a 220w mATX power supply but would work fine on a beefier ATX power supply, all components the same), or a host of other problems. Whether or not you'll ever encounter these errors in a non-Prime95 environment is a different story, but I prefer to be safe than sorry.