Originally Posted by
Falkentyne
But people need to be responsible for what they do, instead of saying stuff (like was posted on hardforums) that you HAVE to prime to make sure your cpu is stable. I had to troll away in that thread, PROVING that you do NOT need to small FFT, showing that my Rybka Chess engine is quite enough for me.
Now, Prime Blend *IS* a useful test. The temps don't get anywhere NEAR the small fft test, and are about a couple of C higher than Rybka, and is a great test to show RAM stability as well. If you can NOT do prime blend, then you are NOT stable at all, and you also risk OS corruption. (I had prime blend give me an error on ALL cores after one test (didn't even get to one pass), when overclocking my RAM (might have needed 1.65v) and I bluescreened right when a round of the game Crossfire ended (yes, the game). At the very least, maybe people can back off the small FFT abuse a bit and try blend to see if their systems will pass that. If they will, then try some gaming or folding and see how it holds up. You don't need to take your system to the edge to show you're stable.
And if your RAM isn't stable, Prime Blend will usually CRASH within the first few minutes. So if you can pass even ONE full pass of blend, your OS won't get wiped due to RAM errors. No need to let it loop overnight...
When I was having problems at *STOCK* on my other system (freezes in games even at stock), I ran prime blend and was getting crashes in about 30 seconds. Small FFT ran forever...(a reseat of the 12v 4 pin fixed that).
About LinX:
Lin X is NOT even supposed to be used as a stability test. It's an internal Intel app designed for binning CPU's and QA testing them. When Lin X came out, people praised it for giving you the option of running it for 30 minutes to test stability, instead of having to run Prime for 12 hours to do the same thing, so they would put less stress on the chips. But the temps got oh-so-much hotter than small fft's. Now, people are running LinX for hours...