I usually set the voltage and clocks to the intended level an start encoding a MKV with X264 (which is the most stressful real world workload).
After around 15 minutes of encoding I check where the temperatures have peaked.
Once I have the temperature information available I start Prime95 Large FFT and set the thread count to four.
Before starting the torture test I set the affinity to the compute units I am going to test during the run (i.e. cores 0-3 = CU0 & CU1).
After starting the test I start reducing the fan rpm until the temperatures reach the same peak level they did during the X264 encode.
After you?re confident that the CPU is stable, repeat the procedure for CU2 & CU3 (cores 4-7).
It takes twice the time the normal method does, but it won't molest your motherboard or CPU beyond the potential breaking point.
Depending on the load line configuration I would recommend that you reduce the core voltage by 6.25 - 12.5mV during the test.
Thats just to compensate the difference in load line effect (droop) you will have from the reduced load from running two compute units instead of all four at once.
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