What does it mean when prime fails?

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Limp Gawd
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Sep 21, 2004
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I'm testing, trying to get the lowest cpu voltage and still maintain stability. Before i would run prime through round 1 of testing to 'call it good.' However i'm letting it run through 4 or 5 tests. Pretty much every single time it will fail after about 58 minutes. Does this mean anything at all or do i just take it with a grain of salt? In the readme it says that running this app on certain machines will show hardware failure when actually, nothing is wrong and in real world user conditions, the hardware will operate just fine. Mentioned of server hardware, no less...

I had a higher clock speed before, i only ran one test of prime95, and it showed no errors. I'd play around in G-mod(HL2) and it would run perfectly fine. However after running prime for an hour, it errord. Should i just ignore prime, or do we actually look to this app in faith?

Seems like someone is blowin smoke. Prime shows error but the computer runs just fine. What is the point in running this program for 8 hours? If it errors at 7 hours and 34 minutes what does that mean?

The program seems useful to some extent...
 
Take what I am about to say with a grain of salt as well because I could be totally off base with what I am about to say and I am sure someone will correct me if I am to far off base.

Alot of people run Prime95 to see exactly how stable their machine is especially when overclocking. If it fails in a short time then more than likely your overclock is not a very good one and you need to adjust it a bit. Also alot of people use it to "burn" in their CPU since it does 100% CPU utilization.

The longer you can get Prime95 to run the more stable your machine should be. If you are a hardcore gamer that plays a game for hours on end oyu want your machine to be as stable as possible and this is one way to check that out.
 
Well prime has been running this time for a bit more than an hour. I think it failed last time because i had a bunch of stuff going on in the background. Should you prime with nothing else happening?
 
It fails due to something being stressed too much and giving a slightly different result than whats expected. It can be the cpu, the ram, it doesnt tell you exactly which it just lets you know something isnt handling it. If your cooling solution is failing itll also of course fail due to overheating.
 
If it is stock and fails means you got a dud or something is rong w/ your fan/hs. I ran mine on a stock HS/FAN w/ an AMD 3500+ and got 0 warnings/errors and it ran 40c full load.
 
in my experience if prime shows an error you need to keep working on it

D
 
When it fails, it means that the CPU or some combination of factors (RAM/CPU/etc) caused the computer to miscalculate a number.
 
ZL1 said:
in my experience if prime shows an error you need to keep working on it

D
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I definetly agree. The point is not that your games etc. seem to run fine, but that every so often at whatever unstable clock/voltage you've found an error at, your computer will miscalculate something. This can lead to corrupt files, crashing, etc.

So, If all you've been doing is dropping voltage it looks like you could either bump the voltage back up, or drop the clocks. Could also try loostening the timings on your RAM.
 
Just wanted to through my 2 cents in. I ran the program with a 3.0 prescott running at 3.3 and got an error 25mins into the test. I have to agree with the above poster on it being the ram... in my case im just using some generic samsung ram in dual channel.
 
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