My way of stress testing sandy without fear of degration

[Skratch]

I just got a new 2600k and my old one kept on needing more vcore because of me pushing and pushing it doing linx and prime runs.

So far this chip is windows stable with pll override off at 4.8

It never sees over 1.38 volts on FULL linx load.

What I do is get it to pass intel burn test with 8 threads and high level( 5 passes)

3 passes of linx 4gb
2 loops of 32m pi

Once I find a sweet spot with the voltages I run 32m pi,winamp,youtube video and loop 3dmark 2001 3 times all running at the same time.

If your setup can pass this its 99% stable for everyday use and you dont have to burn the heck out of your chip trying long prime runs.

My chip has not seen over 60c doing the 3dmark loops and will hit 83c in linx

You can also do a 32m pi while running 3dmark11 at the same time