Quote Originally Posted by CrazyNutz View Post
Yep, I totally back you on this. Actually one of the most tortuous things I do
is video encoding/transcoding, prime95 torture does not even touch that kind
of torture. Current video codec's will use everything the CPU has to offer,
integer, floating point, mmx, sse, etc.. Where as Prime95 appears as if it is
mainly using the floating point unit.

We need a torture test that is based off video encoding, like it contains
a known video sequence of some length, with a checksum generated from
a good encode. This way we can run this encode job and generate a
checksum, and compare it with the known good checksum. This will tell
us if there were errors or not. Maybe I will work on this.

Sorry got a little off topic there.
I too do Video encoding, but i don't see that much more stress to the CPU. I'm doing DivX6 with experimental SSE4.1 Full Search and multithreading enabled, and x264, again with multithreading enabled.

Still, Prime95 loads the CPU harder when it comes to heat, Small FFTs just don't rely on Bus or DRAM, i guess that's why.

However, stressing the additional SSE extensions makes sense to me. A stress test, that stresses the ALU, FPU, and all SSE extensions, but that STILL runs within the CPU only (no DRAM interaction) would be nice as a CPU-only stability test.