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Stress testing

Look at it another way, i've built systems that will pass p95 for 24hrs straight and fall over just web browsing.

The problem with stress testing an overclocked cpu is that the cpu increases stress on many other things, what might have been a stable xmp profile at stock can become unstable, equally a sable cpu clock can be made unstable because of a thermal or power issue.

When i overclock a cpu i always set a static voltage and run the memory at the supported stock speed regardless of the memory spec then stress test , then i'll set the memory xmp or manually overclock and test and tweak again. Finally i'll overclock the gpu do some final stress testing using a mix of gaming , realbench etc. After your happy that everything is stable you can set the cpu voltage to Adaptive/offset and test as needed.
 
agree with darket on it not being a real guarantee.

For example, my old Q6600 system could be made to pass 8 hours of prime, but at the same settings would occasionally crash in other tasks (half the time the system would crash wehen I stopped the prime worker threads as well!).
I had speed step enabled and came to the conclusion that the voltage was swinging too low when transitioning from loaded to unloaded, making it unable to hold the idle clockspeed.

most people tend to agree (in recent years) that 'stability testing' should be conducted with an extended session of whatever your most demanding use case is, whether that be gaming (Battlefield games always seem to find any instability in my experience!), or if you do media editing, a long batch of handbrake encodes/blender renders, overnight.

also worth noting that prime now uses avx instructions, which unless you specifically know you need stability in (games don't use them), hammer the CPU a lot harder, so much so that recent intel CPUs have seperate settings to run at a different multi under avx
 
Real Bench and the x264 v2 stress test are much better real world tests for CPU stress testing. I never push for P95 stability as I don't use AVX functions in the real world. I game, render the odd video/image and do all the usual stuff, never had any issues. Leave a stress test running overnight (12 hours+), if it's still good the next day, consider it a job well done.
 
benjii said:
Real Bench and the x264 v2 stress test are much better real world tests for CPU stress testing. I never push for P95 stability as I don't use AVX functions in the real world. I game, render the odd video/image and do all the usual stuff, never had any issues. Leave a stress test running overnight (12 hours+), if it's still good the next day, consider it a job well done.
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Indeed had prime 9 hours pass to crash IBT in 15 miutes :D
 
Yeh I just use more realistic tests, cinebench, real bench, 3dmark if you want.

Prime is properly brutal and not really relevant, you can have a pc that never crashes in games or video editing ever, that will fall over quickly in a prime test.
 
mattyfez said:
Yeh I just use more realistic tests, cinebench, real bench, 3dmark if you want.

Prime is properly brutal and not really relevant, you can have a pc that never crashes in games or video editing ever, that will fall over quickly in a prime test.
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If a stock PC can run prime and pass for as long as you want then an OC PC should also otherwise it's not truly stable.
 
Broken Hope said:
If a stock PC can run prime and pass for as long as you want then an OC PC should also otherwise it's not truly stable.
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Technically, you're right. However, if you never use AVX functions, thus would never experience a crash because of it, then it's 100% stable for your needs.
 
nightrider1470 said:
Can't get my pc to pass stress testing, prime95

But then I give up and just game for hours and CPU seems fine..

Is stress testing a little OTT?
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Yes, stress testing is OTT.

When you have overclocked your PC you are then basically function testing the system. Why test on a function you won't expect it to carry out other than when you are function testing? It makes no sense.

Run Realbench for a couple of cycles to test initial functionality, and then use the PC as normal to complete function tests. If it blue screens or whatever, then don't see that as a cue to hammer the life out of the system with P95 etc.. just adjust your overclock and continue to function test as normal.
 
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