Hardware - Stress Test With Prime95

Hi group. Am running Prime95. Group 2 seems to be much slower than the rest. It's on pass 3 whilst others are on 9 or 10 after less than 10 mins.
OK now after about15 mins all seem to be running similarly. Temps in low to mid 70s.

Hi Bob,

That seems pretty normal...keep running it for about an hour or so, and if there have been no errors after then, stop the test and start on one of the other two.

Jonathan could you please let me know is this just for over clockers or can I just run it for testing different thermal compounds and coolers in everyday machines.

At the moment I can only see idle and perhaps running some music , graphical stuff on my bog standard Sandy bridge and tester.

I ask because I have one machine that comes up 34C core temp no matter what cooler or thermal I am using in it.

I do also hope to get into trying the over clocking soon and is this the most reliable app to use?

Hello John,

Prime95 is good for pretty much everything - diagnostics, overclocking, thermal testing, and even finding prime numbers.

I use it for (almost ) all of the above. Opinions vary as to whether Prime95 is the most reliable program to use, but from what I've seen it's recommended as much as it's dissed. In my opinion, all those programs work essentially the same, so pick your favorite and get familiar with it.

Jonathan_King said:

Hello John,

Prime95 is good for pretty much everything - diagnostics, overclocking, thermal testing, and even finding prime numbers.

I use it for (almost ) all of the above. Opinions vary as to whether Prime95 is the most reliable program to use, but from what I've seen it's recommended as much as it's dissed. In my opinion, all those programs work essentially the same, so pick your favorite and get familiar with it.

Sorry to pester you but one last query Jonathan I am just a little wary right now re running this testing as I am not over clocking at the moment and do not know just what settings I should use for my i5 2500 on a H67 board as I am purely interested in thermal tests for my processor and also testing the processor on my test machine with a Q9650 quad core and DDR2 RAM.

I just don't want to frying anything as I have just done a lot of work / input into getting these machines just right.

The Large FFTs test will generate the most heat of the three, and thus, it will be best for your tests. Don't worry about frying stuff, really. Temps in the upper 90s or low 100s (for Intel CPUs) are immediately dangerous, and temps below that will just decrease the life of the chip depending on how long it spends running like that. For example, hitting 93c during a torture test won't fry the CPU, but if your system was running at that all the time, you can expect a much shorter life.

In general, if your stress-temps are pushing 80 or 85, it may be time to consider better cooling. The lower, the better.

Thanks Jonathan
I'll give it a try I just wanted to make sure of what I should use and expect - really appreciate your advice.

Ok I know I am little dense but I downloaded the test went though all that stuff and am stuck with a screen as in pic - is there anything happing because I can see nothing running at all. I did try it again and it semed to be over a heartbeat