Originally Posted by
Zaskar
It will not shorten the life of the CPU if your max load temp under those programs is still safe, if however your at like 75c Prime with an i7 CPU and with Linpack/LINX your 85c-90c then thats different, but that means its clocked too high anyways.
The point of stressing the CPU that bad is to drag into the light any instability in a relatively short amount of time, that way a few days, weeks or even months from now your not playing a game and it just locks up or BSOD's and reboots on you.
The flaw in peoples thoughts on this seem to be that if your system is stable for hours on Prime but not on LINX, then it will be stable forever on anything that doesn't stress it over Prime levels, thats wrong.
The less stress just means less of a chance to run into an error, but if its not truly stable then you will eventually get one.
If you don't care about that, its fine, completely up to you and what you find important.
But when people here talk in terms of "Stable" their talking about Perfectly stable under the highest stress testing programs available to us, not "doesn't crash in my games" stable.