Soldato
- Joined
- 2 Dec 2006
- Posts
- 8,204
Its peoples choice, there is no hard and fast rule on this. Ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances, as they say.
For me, I always stress my cpu in tests for minimum 9 hrs (usually 12 ). But I know for a fact that if stable in orthos for just 30mins can be usually good enough for low end workloads (browsing, some games, etc ). But because I use this PC for a lot of 3d rendering (up to 6 hr renders with both cores at 100% a lot of the time) I need the peace of mind that my cpu can handle it. But even with this safety margin I've given myself, there is still risk, albiet much less than if not. Moral is -Everything in life is a risk
Because I have water cooling, temps are never a real problem with me even for decent overclocks, but I'm clever enough not to push stabilty too far. Just the other day I had a clock that bombed out after 7 hrs stressing. I decided it wasn't good enough so turned the clock down/upped the volts a bit..
thats clever for what your doing. But like what i was trying to say. you need it to be that stable. I wont ever do encoding therefore i know that i dont need to be so ooo 12 hours prime or it wont do.
Infact i dont even intend to overclock mine past 3.2ghz because i dont see the point anyway!. In a game what is the difference between 3.2ghz and 3.5ghz? Almost all games are vga limited anyway.