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Stability Testing

B

babochee

Gawd
Joined
Aug 5, 2008
Messages
598
Sup yall...
Ive been looking around at reviews and what not trying to find programs used for stability testing... I finally (after 2 hours) got my e8500 o/c to 4.5ghz and booted to windows... now i need to test it. I saw OCCT used recently in a review but that is it, i just see the programs being mentioned... so what do all yall use?
Thx!
 
I use Prime95 small FFT's first for CPU stability testing. I run that for 6+ hours. During the first half hour or so, I monitor my temps via HW Monitor to make sure nothing's too hot.

If my CPU is Prime95 stable, then I move on to IntelBurnTest. This stresses your CPU quite a bit more and can be used to test the maximum load temps. You actually should probably use IBT before Prime95, since it will fail much earlier than Prime will, thus saving you some time.
 
IBT, perfect thanks... ive just been gaming with it and no probs yet.... I wanted a strong overclock because i have no idea if my two 5870s are bottlenecked or not... How would i find that out? Seems no1 talks about what cpu will start bottlenecking each card. Would my e8500 @ 500fsb and a 9 multiplier be enough for these 2 cards?
 
I would think 4.5GHz would be more than enough for even 2 5870s. Having only 2 cores will be a disadvantage with more highly threaded games, though they are at the moment few and far between.

+1 for IBT, by the way. It's absolutely awesome.
 
Another vote for Intel Burn Test. Run 2 or more threads with 10 passes and you should know if your system is stable in less than an hour.

Tom's Hardware recently did a "Building a Balanced Gaming PC" article where they tested various CPU and Video Card combinations with several games. An E8400 at stock bottlenecked an ATI 4870X2 and Nvidia GTX 295 in some of the games at some of the resolution and quality testings. They didn't test 5870 cards, but I would assume the same bottleneck would occur. Some of the games look like they support additional cores as quad core CPUs were not bottlenecked by the same games and resoutions. I would think that if a game is only threaded for 2 or less cores that an E8500 at stock would probably give the cards everything they need. If a game is threaded for more cores than it won't matter how high you push your CPU, it will still bottleneck your cards.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-balanced-platform,2469.html
 
aznofazns said:
I use Prime95 small FFT's first for CPU stability testing. I run that for 6+ hours. During the first half hour or so, I monitor my temps via HW Monitor to make sure nothing's too hot.

If my CPU is Prime95 stable, then I move on to IntelBurnTest. This stresses your CPU quite a bit more and can be used to test the maximum load temps. You actually should probably use IBT before Prime95, since it will fail much earlier than Prime will, thus saving you some time.
Click to expand...

I'm not a huge fan of Linpack. Sure it works well for quick testing while tweeking but it isn't too good for troubleshooting. I have passed 40 runs of IBT only to fail Prime small fft in 45 minutes (happened more than once on 2 different boards), tweeking my GTLs fixed that. I have also once again passed 40 runs of IBT only to fail a custom Prime run in 2 minutes(Large fft with all of my available ram enabled in custom) with my Yorkfield.

Linpack has it's uses but it is far from the end all be all of stress testing.

Also, keep in mind that Memtest 3.8 is always a good idea to run.
 
Similarly, I've had my CPU pass 6 hours of small FFT's in Prime95, only to fail IBT in less than 10 runs. That's why I suggested using both tools to test for stability. I didn't mean to suggest that IBT was the only worthy tool.
 
Thanks for the info on the settings for IBT ill be sure to use it. Seems its stabile and im only @ 1.4vcore i heard 1.45 is about has high as you would want to go... so perhaps ill go [H]? =) hell i have a q6600 sitting somewhere,,, i might as well see what this chip can do.
And that is interesting info with the bottlenecking... it really makes me think about sticking with just 2 cores o_O
 
I will be folding on both my cpu & gpu for the month of December. If I get through it without any issues, I'm stable.
 
lodingi said:
I will be folding on both my cpu & gpu for the month of December. If I get through it without any issues, I'm stable.
Click to expand...

why are you using distributed computing to test for stability?
 
I like to also use HotCPU for CPU load testing. The lite version is free, and seems to do a good job overall.
 
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