How to run Prime95 on both cores of my CPU

[sdrac]

I have an Athlon FX-60 dual core cpu and I'm trying to get Prime95 to run on both cores.
Within the program itself I found the 'affinity' menu item which lets you tie it to a paritcular core or lets the
cores both be used.
What I've found is that I can only start one instance of Prime95 - so the affinity item isn't of any use. I can specify a paritcular core, but when I try to start up another instance it just brings me back into scope of the original window that was running the initial version of Prime95. Is there someway to do this within the program or do you just have to have another copy of it, renamed, and run it that way (using affinity to assign it to different cores for each)?
I also noticed two things while playing around with this. First, if I set affinity so that either core can be used, it invariably seems to always run on core1. I can see core1 at 100% utlization and core2 at near 0%. I do have the dual core optimizer from AMD on the system so I'm not sure why it does that, unless its just the way this program behaves.
The second thing is that when it is running on just this one core, the system is incredibly slow - even though the second core shows almost no utilization. I'm thinking (hoping) this is due to Prime95 hogging memory bandwidth even though its only on one core, but I was wondering if anyone else saw ever saw this and had any explanations?

Thx,
Sdrac

 

[Hawkeye22]

Did you read the readme file that came with it? You need to start it from a command line using the -a switch.

 

[MooseMuffin]

You need to modify your prime95 shortcut. First make a copy of the shortcut so you have two of them. Then go to the properties screen of each shortcut and change them so they read:

"C:\Program Files\prime95\prime95.exe" -A0
"C:\Program Files\prime95\prime95.exe" -A1

...changing the path if you installed it somewhere else. That should open up 2 instances with proper affinity.

 

[TurdBurglar]

First open Prime95, go to advanced and select Affinity and set it to 0. Next open the run command line in the start menu. Now you need to drag the shortcut for Prime in the box that you would type in, it should look something like this

"C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\Shortcut to PRIME95.lnk"

Now you need to add something to the end of that line. You want to add a space at the end and type %u2013a1. So it looks like this

"C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\Shortcut to PRIME95.lnk" %u2013a1

Press ok and a second Prime95 will open. Now set them both for your torture test of choice.

 

[TurdBurglar]

Knew I shouldn't have taken so long

 

[sdrac]

Readme? I guess I shouldn't always ignore them
Anyway, thanks for the help all!

 

[Valdis]

ORTHOS

 

[EXT64]

As to your second question about being slow even while utilizing only one core, I believe your RAM is all used up like you guessed. The torture test uses a ton of RAM.