Prime95 - how long to run for?

My overclock passed 5 runs on High in IBT early this evening.

I'm gonna stay up late watching TV till about 2am, would that be enough time? It started at 7pm.
 
8hrs is my preferred time period, and i was able to browse the net fine while running prime95 small fft.
 
Blend, 12+ hours. First time I ran it I did the 8 people advised, it failed closer to 9. Longer the better really, but you can use the machine while its running.
 
I'm happy with a couple of hours but I'll never really do anything that requires total stability at 100% load for even that long. If you do endless hours of rendering/compiling/etc and reliability is of utmost importance you'll want to know it can run much longer. So it depends on what you do with your machine - ask yourself what you need. Pointless aiming for 12-hours prime95 stability if you'll just be playing the odd few huors of games here and there. On the flipside, as a very bare minimum you at least want it to run until it's reached a stable temp - mine tops out about 70 degrees after 20 minutes or so and wont get any hotter. I dare say pretty much any consumer grade equipment, even at stock settings, would fail prime95 at some point if you ran it long enough ;)
 
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Liampope said:
total stability at 100% load
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Load is not really relevant, if prime found a problem in a specific way any program will have a problem using the chip in the same way. IBT is 100% load, prime doesn't push the cpu nearly as hard and doesn't get nearly as hot, it's just plain stability. If it throws up an error then when another program uses the chip in that way it will crash/blue screen - the time it took for prime to find it is irrelevant.

This almost totally stable mentality confuses me. A cpu can either function without error or it cannot, it is either stable or it is not, there is no middle ground. Pretty much any consumer grade equipment functioning correctly will pass prime without error, as your cpu should have done.
 
I used to do the 8 thing with prime and learned that is mean diddly passing 8 hours as 1 hr into gaming BSOD. Since then i put a day aside for stabilty and do

1 hour OCCT>>2 hours prime>> 2+ hours gaming>> 4hours+ folding that one had not let me down yet so easch to their own :D
 
I never run it for more than two hours and often just an hour or so on an already warmed up PC.

However I always back off around 5% from the highest stable speed I get with that and some other tests to give a good margin for changes in components over times, extra hot days etc. Never failed so far, but obviously I am losing a little top end speed.
 
8 hours minimum for me.

If your going to overclock then why skimp on making sure its completely stable whatever you throw at it
 
When I run Prime95, I run it initially for about an hour per increase but when I am at a stage where I want to stop for a while, I will do a minimum of 12hours to check it all out.

I will also not qualify the overclock as stable if it can not withstand 12hours of Prime95 and 20 IBT runs. After I like to loop a few PC and 3DMarks too to be completely sure.

Over the top? Maybe but its my hardware and I want to insure I am caring for it.
 
Can honestly say that as yet, i've never come across a stability issue with any overclock if i can get it to blend for 24 hours on prime
 
Has to be 8 hours or more I recently ran 2 hour blend test on my 6420 @ 3.5 ghz passed fine but have had a few bluescreens gaming so 2 hours is not a good indication at all really.
 
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