PIII 866@1040 Prime 95 how good does it have to be?

[Eurodj]

I took everyones advice and ran a torture test on my pc and on test 26 of 29 win2k crashed a blue screen was presented so my question is what does this mean i played unreal tournament for a coupe of hours and she hasnt shown any signs of weakness so what do do do i stay on 1040 or drop back down to 1008 contrary to what most people say the difference is very clear she runs much smoother at this speed and seems to run cool last time i dropped to 975 she was getting hotter apparently the farther i go the cooler she gets weird?!? so what do i do do i just use it for a couple of weeks and see what happens or do i drop down the 40 mhz pci has me worried though nothing shows signs of wear nor tear because of it i just hope she stays that way!!!

[Eurodj]

Oh here is some of that ssoft sandra stuff i see evryone doing these are my benchmarks and temp readings

[anvil]

Eurodj,

Prime95 tests the cpu/memory in particular. To go to test 26 says that you have a pretty stable machine. I read of guys with Athalons hardly able to run a minute in Prime95 and claiming to run games without a problem.

You might want to look at the temp thing if there is a question there. You didn't mention the load temp under Prime95. If in the vicinity of 40 C or more you might want to bring it down a bit. If temp is fine you could do a vcore nudge.

But really, getting to test 26 says you are pretty solid. Prime95 does not typically lead to a crash of windows, ... just an error message saying it has a round off error or a checksum error. That is a little troubling.

So maybe this is not a cpu/memory problem but something to do with the pci overclock. What is the divider on you mb for your 120 fsb? If 3, as I suspect, then you would be at a pci speed of 40, which is high I guess. Maybe some others more familiar with the pci oc can help out?

anvil

[Phil]

It may seem stable in normal use and that prime95 is the only thing that has a problem, but it's more to do with otehr things not error checking and just accepting the answer, when prime reports an error it is talking about ver long decimaly figures that are being rounded up wrong. In normal use this may not be a problem, but imaging everytime the cpu controls a write to disk there is this chance of an error, and eventually it may completely corrupt the file system, and need a format and re-install.
If prime95 isn't stable then I say the system isn't stable.

[Placid]

Anvil a 866cpu is 133x6.5. 1040 is 160x6.5 (Just so you know).
A bsod while running prime 95 is unusual.

Just run it at 1040 and if you dont have too many lockups then keep it.
If you have not already raised the cpu vcore voltage then you might want to raise it as that usually helps stability but it also raises temps so keep a close eye on them if you do.
If you dont have a good cpu heatsink you might want to invest in one.

[anvil]

Placid,

My face is red! I could say oops, just a math error, ... but I teach math!

I didn't check the multiplier before I opened my big mouth.

anvil