best way to run prime 95 on dual core?

[AgentIce]

Sup guys, just woke up to get a drink of water in the middle of the night, checked my comp which was running prime 95 while I did. It ran for 5 hours with no errors but I'm not sure it's working correctly. It seems like after a while of doing tests the cpu usage drops to 0 on both and the hard drive just goes nuts, like it's only testing my virutal memory system or something. I've also noticed that it is very rarely using both cores, usually one is at full load and the other is at 0.

I have two copies of the program in seperate folders and have set the affinities correctly and this behavior has been consistent. It's almost like one of the programs hogs up all the memory leaving the other cpu nothing to do at first, eventually the other one catches up though. Then they both just don't go anywhere really with the HD going nuts. That's what I woke up to, 0% cpu usage on both cores, hd goin mad. Now programs like superpi certainly stress both cores to the max at all times through the test so it's something to do with prime95. Is this normal behavior or am I doing something wrong?

I have recently tried some registry tweaks (tried them before overclocking) which got rid of a crashing problem for me in oblivion even though I'm not entirely sure what they do. That might have something to do with it going into "hard drive mode" after a while. As far as pretty much only one cpu being utilized, that has always been the case, even before I did the tweaks. Heres the tweaks I did if they mean anything to anyone:

Navigate to: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management]

Delete these keys (if you have them):

"DisablePagingExecutive"
"LargeSystemCache"

Navigate to: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPriorityControl]

Delete this key (if you have it):
"Win32PrioritySeparation"

 

[MadModMike]

Sup guys, just woke up to get a drink of water in the middle of the night, checked my comp which was running prime 95 while I did. It ran for 5 hours with no errors but I'm not sure it's working correctly. It seems like after a while of doing tests the cpu usage drops to 0 on both and the hard drive just goes nuts, like it's only testing my virutal memory system or something. I've also noticed that it is very rarely using both cores, usually one is at full load and the other is at 0.

I have two copies of the program in seperate folders and have set the affinities correctly and this behavior has been consistent. It's almost like one of the programs hogs up all the memory leaving the other cpu nothing to do at first, eventually the other one catches up though. Then they both just don't go anywhere really with the HD going nuts. That's what I woke up to, 0% cpu usage on both cores, hd goin mad. Now programs like superpi certainly stress both cores to the max at all times through the test so it's something to do with prime95. Is this normal behavior or am I doing something wrong?

I have recently tried some registry tweaks (tried them before overclocking) which got rid of a crashing problem for me in oblivion even though I'm not entirely sure what they do. That might have something to do with it going into "hard drive mode" after a while. As far as pretty much only one cpu being utilized, that has always been the case, even before I did the tweaks. Heres the tweaks I did if they mean anything to anyone:

Navigate to: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management]

Delete these keys (if you have them):

"DisablePagingExecutive"
"LargeSystemCache"

Navigate to: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPriorityControl]

Delete this key (if you have it):
"Win32PrioritySeparation"

1. "DisablePageExecutive" puts the OS Kernel into Memory rather than Page File

2. "LargeSystemCache" basically tells XP to use all but 4MB of System Memory

3. "Win32PrioritySeparation" the best way I can explain this, is that it basically puts more attention to applications and let's them use more memory

Those tweaks are useless for Prime, and actually may CAUSE your HDD to do that. Try running 1 CPU w/ BLEND (The heavy RAM one) and one with SMALL FFT's (The CPU tester). That way you don't have 2 CPU's fighting for Memory and they all get tested.

~~Mad Mod Mike, pimpin' the world 1 rig at a time

 

[kolemunky]

where are you setting affinity? You have to set affinity through the task manager, not prime95. This might be your problem.

 

[AgentIce]

Yeah I set it in task manager.

Well I changed those registry settings back to default, at least this time one of the cpus was being utilized when I checked it. HD still going nuts when I woke up to check on it though and I did check it at a different point in time so it's hard to be sure the registry tweak did anything.