casualbuilder

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Aug 8, 2011
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I currently am running a 555BE in a 990fx Sabertooth with a Zalman CNSP9900A LED HSF. I have it OC'd to 4.33GHz (stock 1.428v) and idle it runs at 23c. My NB is OC'd to 2808, and my RAM is running around 728/stick (dual channel) if im correct in that thinking. All temps seem fine, and my purpose for this machine is soley for gaming, media (movies,music), and internet surfing. Data transfer is negligable (download games rarely) and i do most if not all excel/word projects on my laptop. Running Prime95, what would you consider stable for time ran? I am very new to OC'ing, which is why the thread caught my post, but spending $1,100 on a system causes me to take caution when "tinkering". Any advice would be greatly appreciated
 
Solution

grahamie

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Oct 16, 2010
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Solution
While attempting to find the sweet spot overclock, I run Prime95 Blend for an hour at each speed. Once I've settled on the final speed, I run Prime95 in all three modes for 24 hours each. If it passes all three, then that's the final speed. If not, I back it down and start the three rounds again. I do realize that my method is a bit extreme, so I only recommend running Prime95 Blend for 24 hours for other people.

What most people don't understand is that you can do most of your normal stuff while Prime95 is running. You don't need to start Prime95 and leave the system alone for 24 hours. Web surfing, downloading files, Office apps, watching movies, gaming ... Prime95 won't interfere too much with any of them. It simply uses all of the spare cycles that your other programs don't use. If you do something like rendering though, Prime95 won't be able to do anything (because the rendering program will use all cores and all CPU cycles) and you might as well not start the torture test until after you're done with the render.