Stability Testing - Mandatory

[BlindedByScience]

Bump to make it in after the prune....

Edit - This post got hacked in the prune, so I'm shutting it down. PM me if you want my burn in routine.....

B.B.S.

 

[burningrave101]

When testing on a Pentium 4 you want to install two instances of Prime95 and run both of them at the same time because of Hyper Threading. Otherwise, you will load one and will only get around a 55% CPU load.

Once you have both installed and open both up you need to go into Advanced -> Affinity of the first one and untick "Let program run on any CPU" and set it to 0 which it will already be at and click OK. Then go into the second Prime95 install and follow the same steps and set it to 1.

Now click on Options -> Torture Test and then change it to Small FFTs and then go in the other one and change it to In-place large FFTs.

Now run both of them and watch your processor scale to 100% usage.

To monitor processor usage just type Ctrl + Alt + Delete and then click on the Performance tab.

Make sure you let Prime95 run for AT LEAST 8 hours. I would suggest 10-12 hours.

 

[BillLeeLee]

Heh, I stressed test my system with Prime, 3D Mark, and Memtest86 when I OCed it to 3.2, and it passed the tests after running them for hours on end.

When I was installing Linux and had to compile the system, the compiling was aborted because the overclock caused errors. Turned it back to stock, and it worked fine.

So I guess Prime95, Memtest, hours of gaming, and 3D Mark showed no problems, whereas compiling (which also pushes the CPU to max usage) halted the system. Strange.

 

[burningrave101]

The following is the best stability testing guide i've seen. Everyone should have it bookmarked in their favorites and well memorized .

http://radified.com/Articles/stability_testing.htm

 

[Pulse]

It is easy to run prime95 in 2 instances from batch files. Just save one with prime95.exe -A0 and another with prime95 -A1 in the same folder as the program and drag the shortcuts to them to the desktop.

I had to make 2 batch files as having both lines in one didn't seem to work. I also let prime use up to 128 mb ram but it never really loads that much up.

Yes stability is MORE important than anything. Found that out when trying to do a backup to a DVD with an unstable system and then realising the disk has errors all over it AFTER wiping the drive...

 

[misfitsfiend]

i've just run prime 95 torture test on my machine, and it says it ran for 2 hours, 2 minutes until it got an error which says: FATAL ERROR:rounding was 0.4630615711 expected less than .4
hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file. what does this mean and how can i fix it? my dad said the computer was too loud so i turned the fan down quite a bit, so if i turn it all the way up will it fix that problem?

 

[BillLeeLee]

Originally posted by misfitsfiend
i've just run prime 95 torture test on my machine, and it says it ran for 2 hours, 2 minutes until it got an error which says: FATAL ERROR:rounding was 0.4630615711 expected less than .4
hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file. what does this mean and how can i fix it? my dad said the computer was too loud so i turned the fan down quite a bit, so if i turn it all the way up will it fix that problem?

Are you overclocking at all? If you are, heat could be the problem, or your processor and/or memory can't handle the OC.

If you're at stock, heat could still be a problem (what are your temps?), but memory and CPU are also still suspect.

If overclocking, turn it back to stock and see if it can handle prime. If it's already at stock, download Memtest86 at www.memtest86.com and use it to test your memory to see if it throws up errors.

 

[misfitsfiend]

yeah my comp is running @ 2.4 ghz right now, but i just turned my fan up and left for work. after running for ~4 and a half hours, 0 errors so i guess just too hot.