IS this Ok?

Danzas4321 · Nov 17, 2013

Hey guys. as you see in my sig i have an athlon x4 760k OCed @4.5ghz @1.5v. ive played Bf4 for like 4 hours straight and IBt is stable for 10 passes at maximum stress. I have had my PC Oced to this frequency for over a month 24/7. temperatures never go above 56 degrees under full load. However, whenever i run P95 i instantluy bluescreen. it is really bugging me why it is stable in everything except this. Any ideas?

Devballs · Nov 17, 2013

Intel burn test is exactly that, a burn test. Most games/applications will never pin your CPU 100% consistently like IBT does, have you tried running AIDA64 for a few hours? I know most people do not recommend IBT because it is so hard on the CPU. However that being said if AIDA64 is unable to run for a few hours before BSOD you may have too aggressive of an overclock/not enough volts to your CPU.

MU_Engineer · Nov 17, 2013

Danzas4321 :

Does Prime95 bluescreen when your CPU is overclocked a little less and especially does it bluescreen at stock speeds? If so, you have a software problem rather than a hardware problem.

If you back off a bit and now Prime95 works fine, then what you discovered is that your CPU was overclocked just beyond the level where it is perfectly stable. Many programs can have an erroneous calculation here and there and "fail gracefully." This means that you don't notice the error. Games are pretty tolerant of this as far as things go. Intel Burn Test is a thermal testing tool, not a processor stability testing tool, and may very well tolerate mis-calculated results and not crash. A program that does a lot of mathematical calculations such as Prime95 is much more sensitive to mis-calculated results and will eventually get to the point where it crashes or blue-screens. That's why we use those kinds of programs to see if our CPUs are overclocked too far.

FYI, there are better programs for testing stability than Prime95. I like to use a little tool called StressCPU v2 which was developed by Stanford University to stress-test their HPC equipment for doing molecular dynamics simulations. It is EXTREMELY sensitive to any errors in calculations, to the point where you can generally pick up memory as well as CPU errors more rapidly than most other tools I have used. Unfortunately the link where I used to find the utility has moved so you will need to search for it, but it is certainly a useful utility.

Danzas4321 · Nov 17, 2013

MU_Engineer :

Danzas4321 :

Does Prime95 bluescreen when your CPU is overclocked a little less and especially does it bluescreen at stock speeds? If so, you have a software problem rather than a hardware problem.

If you back off a bit and now Prime95 works fine, then what you discovered is that your CPU was overclocked just beyond the level where it is perfectly stable. Many programs can have an erroneous calculation here and there and "fail gracefully." This means that you don't notice the error. Games are pretty tolerant of this as far as things go. Intel Burn Test is a thermal testing tool, not a processor stability testing tool, and may very well tolerate mis-calculated results and not crash. A program that does a lot of mathematical calculations such as Prime95 is much more sensitive to mis-calculated results and will eventually get to the point where it crashes or blue-screens. That's why we use those kinds of programs to see if our CPUs are overclocked too far.

FYI, there are better programs for testing stability than Prime95. I like to use a little tool called StressCPU v2 which was developed by Stanford University to stress-test their HPC equipment for doing molecular dynamics simulations. It is EXTREMELY sensitive to any errors in calculations, to the point where you can generally pick up memory as well as CPU errors more rapidly than most other tools I have used. Unfortunately the link where I used to find the utility has moved so you will need to search for it, but it is certainly a useful utility.

If i back off down to 4.4ghz it is stil stable in everything except P95. forgot to mention

also, should i really care that all other programs run perfectly fine? it doesnt really impact me in any way

Devballs · Nov 17, 2013

If your day to day life is unaffected then you have no worries.

MU_Engineer · Nov 17, 2013

If it's only unstable in Prime95 but nothing else...still realize that you may be unstable doing something "new." That's fine for a computer where it doesn't really matter if it doesn't work perfectly 100.000% of the time but might not be if you demand the utmost reliability from your machine.

I personally would back off until the machine is perfectly stable running anything overclocked the same as it runs things stock. Note that I run nothing but server gear with ECC memory, never overclock anything, run a Unix OS, rarely have anything that's "cutting edge" for performance, and measure continuous uptimes in terms of years. I demand that if I get a call/page at say, 0200 hours, that my computer Just Works(tm) and that I can get the issue resolved pronto and go back to bed ASAP rather than fiddling around with the computer for any longer. That's much more important to me than having an extra 10% performance. Your priorities may vary.

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IS this Ok?

Danzas4321

Honorable

Devballs

Honorable

MU_Engineer

Splendid

Danzas4321

Honorable

Devballs

Honorable

MU_Engineer

Splendid

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