Prime95 General Discussion

[schwizer]

Prime95 always comes to mind for stress testing. If it passes, computer is stable, all is good. But what's a pass? How long? Which version?

I mean Prime95 is essentially a program that "tries" to crash your computer. What I would like to know is; can it make a stable computer crash? I'm wondering if anyone has ever looked at Prime95 in detail at a programming level to see if there are any artificial causes for crashes. For example, all it would potentially take to crash a computer is a slow memory leak which would eventually bog everything down and sooner or later trigger a crash. Now this is a bit of a chicken-before-the-egg kind of thing because if it doesn't pass prime, then it's not stable and therefore we don't really have a controlled computer that we know is "stabe". The best we can do is to assume that one @ stock frequencies/voltages is stable.

I propose a barrage of Pime95 tests on some of Tom's, or anyone elses, computers @ stock values to determine how many "stable" computers Prime95 can crash. Try different versions, different tests, look at things like total memory used to see if its slowl creeping up etc. I mean at the end of the day, i could probably spend 24 hours opening up 1000 copies of the same word program and at some point my computer would probably crash even though it's stable. What could this bring us? well maybe a more refined Prime95 program and maybe a few extra hertz for my overclock

Cheerios

 

[Henry Chinaski]

Prime 95 makes the computer to work at almost at 100% of its performance. If you have been running it for 24h without any problem, your settings are safe.
It can't make crash a stable computer. If it fails is because it has some weaknesses.
But if your computer doesn't pass the prime95 test doesn't mean that your computer is not stable enough for your daily work. These are differents things.
Prime95 is not a program that tries to crash computers. It only makes the computer to work almost at the maximum of its potential. If the micro is ok and the refrigeration is good there is not problem and if there is one at stock frecuency, take your micro (or memories...)and go to the shop because something is defective.

 

[schwizer]

It can't make crash a stable computer. If it fails is because it has some weaknesses.

I agree with you that that it should not cause a stable computer to crash. However, i think we can all agree that any program can potentially crash even a stable computer if there is a bad memory reference, memory leak etc etc. What i'm proposing is a look at Prime95 to ensure that the crashes it is causing are always due to hardware instabilities and not due to a coding issue in the program itself.

No idea how this could be done though><