Stability testing To PRIME or not to PRIME that is the question!

swiftmetal

swiftmetal

swiftmetal

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Now before we start I am not wanting to start an argument just try to settle ongoing debates around using Prime and IBT to check for stability. I am not suggesting that I personally know everything nor am I saying that using these programs in any way damage your systems.

Now with that out of the way I pose my question.


Should you use PRIME and things like IBT to check for stability and maximum temperatures. (Please start your post with FOR or AGAINST Prime and lets do our selves a favor and not quote everyone and arguing with their posts just post you own opinion on the matter THANKYOU.)


AGAINST

Personally I don't like using prime to find stability in my system because I find that i get higher clocks than people using it. This is because I base my temps on what I play and do normally and if the system crashes I then mess about with the settings.

In a pinch I will use 3D Mark 11 on loop because I have seen overclocks be perfectly stable in prime and then crash in the first few seconds of the cpu tests in 3D mark.

I think of my cpu as a car most . Would you buy a brand new car and thrash it to within an inch of its life for hours upon hours just to see if it was ok to drive the speed limit for the rest of the time. I know I would not I would just drive my car normally and and see if it would perform under the type of circumstances that I would be using it for in the first place.

So in short my personal opinion on the matter is that you get higher clocks no unneeded torture to the cpu and real world stability.

Thank you for your time.
 
BOTH.

FOR:

Prime is great for seeing the "Higher temps that your system could possibly produce after 30min-60min of super-heavy usage". IBT temps are completely unrealistic.

AGAINST:

If you OC to a level where prime produces a 90c temp, ad think its too high, you might be missing out the fact that your temp will never go over 70 even in your heaviest game. Then you tune down the OC and lose performance.

Personally I use prime to find my maximum temp (Lets say at 4.4gz thats 80c), and then I start tuning my overclock until my "real world" testing puts my temp to -10c from that.
 
I don't want to for for/against, i will just chime in with my opinion..

For stress testing its best to use real-life activities like gaming.

But...

How many people want a game to crash 5-10 (maybe even more) minutes into the experience, let alone in an online match..

I only tend to use prime as a gauge.. I run it for as little time as i see possible.. Its just something that can be left, while you go make a cup of tea/coffee/ice-tea (if youre 8 pack) and then evualate from there.

if my overclock passes 10-15 minutes of prime, then i go into games.. A good hour will show you any in-stability.

8 Pack say Prime is silicon torture, i assume IBT is worse..
 
Against:
Prime is only good for finding out how good your cooling really is by maxing the CPU temp, for stability I prefer games as I have had my CPU pass Prime for hours only to fail within minutes of playing COD2...
I'll admit it is good for finding a starting point and ensuring your cooling is up to the task, but it is not a true indicator of stability.
 
Agasint

In the past when overclocking Ive used prime for 30mins, to check max temps, I then move onto gaming, I have overclocked before stressing my cpu for hours on end to load Crysis up and BSOD after 10 minutes of gaming.
Prime is useless for stablility testing and should only be used as a first stop when trying out new volts or O/C.
 
use whatever you want,no right or wrong way

you probably couldn't use prime95/intel burn test on modern haswell chips due to the poor heat transfer(hot running)

but ivy/sandybridge and older chips you can stress them with those programs without worry

I just like to know where I am in 100% extreme cpu load temps and adjust oc/voltages to stay around the 80c mark,it is safe to go higher its just my personal safe point for temps as is max 1.4v and under cpu voltage
 
To each their own but at the end of the day Intel would not ship a CPU if it was not stable in Prime95, processors are supposed to be stable under all conditions. It's only a recent phenomenon due to out of control TDP levels (high end GPU's, Bulldozer/Piledriver) that throttling has become a 'feature' in stressful conditions to protect the hardware.

Most people take the anti-Prime stance because it tells them something they don't want to hear. You should use a variety of tools not just one or two, a stable processor shouldn't fail in anything software bugs aside.
 
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Just make sure you do tests with your GPU running as well, otherwise you might find that you get overheating even if the CPU is prime stable.
 
I'm pretty much like Doomedspeed.
I run Prime for 10-15 minutes just to check for obvious stability and heat issues. Then I just use it.
Reason being I don't want to jump into an online game of BF3/COD26 and 6 seconds in crash, then rinse and repeat for the next 3 hours while trying to dial it in.

To use the car metaphor, I'd rather not be driving to work and get halfway only to find the engines exploded if I could've found the same thing by taking it for a quick spin the day before.

Also as far as chip degradation goes, how many people actually hold on to a chip long enough for this to be an issue?
It's also pretty poor if pushing a CPU hard will cause it to degrade. How much over spec are you supposed to buy to ensure you don't push it too hard? Little machine for web browsing and e-mail? Best put a 4960X in there so you don't push it too much and degrade the chip!
 
swiftmetal said:
Would you buy a brand new car and thrash it to within an inch of its life for hours upon hours just to see if it was ok to drive the speed limit for the rest of the time. I know I would not I would just drive my car normally and and see if it would perform under the type of circumstances that I would be using it for in the first place.
Click to expand...

Don't worry, your brand new car has already had the nuts thrashed off it at the factory ( I used to do it) :p
 
Against.

However in the past i was pretty strict about running programs such as p95/ibt. But now as the owner of a very hot running 4770k i avoid them. The temps generated by this chip are too high. Prefer to just use it for my normal tasks, (primarily gaming). Ive often had prime/ibt stable clocks that have failed in seconds of playing a game. If something does crash/freeze in game i just work from the error messages etc to get things running correctly.
 
BOTH.

FOR:

If the system isn't stable, then it isn't stable, it's that simple. A lot of people forget that Prime is a real world application not a synthetic test like IBT, if it fails in Prime then it may well fail in F@H or BOINC or Bitcoin. Also just because it is stable in Prime doesn't mean it will be stable in everything.

Personally I prefer to tune my system to be as stable and as fast as possible, without sacrificing either.


AGAINST:

For some people "stable enough for what I do" is enough, playing [game] 250MHz faster than you could while completely stable and getting the weekly blue screen in exchange is fine for some people and I know a bunch of them.
 
Pretty new to all this but have found Prime pushed to much and my overclock eventually failed even at stock settings. I have took on board a lot of peoples advice and and opinions and am now using gaming as my benchmark as it's the only thing i do, i have yet to get a freeze or blue screen with overclocks that would have failed Prime within minutes. So no more Prime for me
 
Prime No need!!!

Encoding, Gaming, Editing, win rar, browsing, folding or whatever you use your PC for!!! Do need!!!
 
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I do a quick run on intel burn test, something like 5 runs should take about 5 mins on my i5 then if its stable I either up the clock or volts.

Then do a 30min run and then thats it.

Pc has been stable for well over a year now
 
It's not a very simple question. Computers get maths wrong. Rarely, but they do. Even at stock speeds, even when everything is within tolerance. An overclocked computer is likely to get maths wrong more frequently.

"Stable" tends to mean "I haven't crashed it yet". If it fails IBT, it gets maths wrong often enough for IBT to notice. If it passes, it gets maths wrong infrequently enough that IBT hasn't noticed. Passing IBT is fairly difficult, so it's "stable enough" for most people. Passing game testing is easier, and I guess means you're "stable enough" for gaming.

I'm increasingly sure that trying to drive the error rate to zero is an exercise in futility - you have to balance cost against reliability of result.
 
JonJ678 said:
It's not a very simple question. Computers get maths wrong. Rarely, but they do. Even at stock speeds, even when everything is within tolerance. An overclocked computer is likely to get maths wrong more frequently.

"Stable" tends to mean "I haven't crashed it yet". If it fails IBT, it gets maths wrong often enough for IBT to notice. If it passes, it gets maths wrong infrequently enough that IBT hasn't noticed. Passing IBT is fairly difficult, so it's "stable enough" for most people. Passing game testing is easier, and I guess means you're "stable enough" for gaming.

I'm increasingly sure that trying to drive the error rate to zero is an exercise in futility - you have to balance cost against reliability of result.
Click to expand...

And this is why I like to do some testing with Prime95/IBT. What if I'm getting maths errors that aren't that obvious in a game but now I'm doing video encoding and it's getting maths wrong all over the place. Doesn't mean it'll crash or that the encode will fail, but you might notice it when you watch it back (after say 80 minutes of watching). Or what if I'm installing a driver or an important Windows patch?

Don't see the harm in a little stress testing if it helps with peace-of-mind.
 
I like to test with prime, if it passes that after say 20 mins, ill go on a game. Prime is a temperature gauge as well, I know that if Im 76-80c in a prime test, Gaming will get to roughly 70c and thats good information. Also obviously if you dont pass your not completely stable (Or stable "enough") that said I dont base my overclock being stable just by prime alone.
 
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