Soldato
An explanation or clarification. I have been overclocking computers since the 1990's and yes Prime95 was the go to tool for stress testing overclocks in the day. That was mainly single and dual core Athlon and Pentiums, some four cores, and they were all overclocked, overvolted and quite well cooled.
Now we do have alternatives. Prime95 is good if you are stress testing your cooling on the PC. It certainly develops the most heat. It is not particularly relevant to workloads be it gaming or rendering or other tasks. UNLESS your goal is to find new prime numbers and I would not do mission critical tasks on an overclocked PC.
I find that using a program task such as a large render will load the cores to prove stability, and I do not have machine crashes, blue or black screens after I have stress tested in this way. A few runs of IBT (non AVX) with large memory sets will show that the throughput is optimised and will also test the cooling qute well.
Purists will say "Not overnight Prime tested, not stable", I beg to differ. With modern muticore processors on shrunk dies Prime95 is not my goto tool. The old ethos of prime test then drop down a notch or two on volts and frequency for 24/7 use is better replaced with use the computer for everything you would normally then just keep that frequency. If it falls over or overheats back it off a little.
If you want a computer that can run 4, 8 to 16 fully loaded cores with FP calculations on a 24/7 basis then use Prime but do not overclock (much). If you want a fast gaming rendering general purpose machine, overclock it and test it otherwise.
There is more to overclocking than the Intel method (click 48 or 50) then Prime.
WTF Reddit
Now we do have alternatives. Prime95 is good if you are stress testing your cooling on the PC. It certainly develops the most heat. It is not particularly relevant to workloads be it gaming or rendering or other tasks. UNLESS your goal is to find new prime numbers and I would not do mission critical tasks on an overclocked PC.
I find that using a program task such as a large render will load the cores to prove stability, and I do not have machine crashes, blue or black screens after I have stress tested in this way. A few runs of IBT (non AVX) with large memory sets will show that the throughput is optimised and will also test the cooling qute well.
Purists will say "Not overnight Prime tested, not stable", I beg to differ. With modern muticore processors on shrunk dies Prime95 is not my goto tool. The old ethos of prime test then drop down a notch or two on volts and frequency for 24/7 use is better replaced with use the computer for everything you would normally then just keep that frequency. If it falls over or overheats back it off a little.
If you want a computer that can run 4, 8 to 16 fully loaded cores with FP calculations on a 24/7 basis then use Prime but do not overclock (much). If you want a fast gaming rendering general purpose machine, overclock it and test it otherwise.
There is more to overclocking than the Intel method (click 48 or 50) then Prime.
WTF Reddit
