Should I prime for 3 days?

[PCGUY112887]

I am waiting on my memory (damn slow fedex) and it should come in soon. I am going to be leaving Sunday afternoon and will be back Wednesday afternoon. My computer won't be doing anything, so you think I should overclock it some and let it prime for 3 days to do a burn in? I mean I won't be here, should I be worried of the freak chance a fan quits? The computer is brand new... never been booted yet. What ya think? Obviouselly I will be doing some tests before I leave to make sure nothing is seriouselly wrong... like I mounted the fan bad or anything.

Also when you put your processor on load and it's there for a few hours, can it start to go higher? I don't want to start it, learn my load temp is 55*C, then come back and have it reading like 65*C. And what happens on the AMD XP Mobiles if they start to overheat? Will my NF7-S just like turn off once it hits a certian temp or what?

Thx

 

[Drec]

chances are if your temps get to high ur cpu will become unstable n prime will fail...then ur temps will go back down to idle so i wouldent worry about that...i did the saem thing n learned im prime stable for about 75 hours.

 

[Dragonprince]

As time goes by I am beginning to think less and less of Prime myself. I just dont see any benefit to hammering on your rig with that program. I have run rigs that will Fold or run SETI without error for as long as I care to let them run (weeks), or will game until my hands are sore and I have to quit, yet they will fail Prime in minutes.
I'm not arguing that the program might be useful for NASA or the DoD but I see no benefit for anyone else. Just my opinion, im sure others will have a different view.

 

[Sjaak]

priming for burn-in is useless. some people still believe in it, but the results are within the failure margin. To test stability, however, its a good measure. the longer, the better

 

[Lifthanger]

so which program would be useful, to do a burn in?
cpu burn in?

 

[Sjaak]

a burn-in in general is useless IMO

 

[Jiggahurtz]

Burn in is a mystical Voo Doo. Some people do it and can get to speeds they previously couldn't get to stable. Some people do it and gain nothing. Generally when it works and no one knows how it just makes the cpu stable at speeds it crashed out at before. But its more luck of the draw then with cpu's. Overclock to your top stable speed. Then drop your cpu down to the lowest possible speed. Crank the volts to the max and let Prime or Sandra burn away at the chip for about a week. Then go back to what your max speed was and test your cpu. If you can lower the volts and still keep it stable where it would flunk out before or raise the cpu into a higher crash happy speed which now becomes stable, you have effectively used the voodoo of burn in. Or you will do all of that for nothing at all and will have wasted a week.

 

[HousERaT]

the burn in process seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur. Priming I guess depends on how secure you need to be in your system stability. If you like to leave your computer on for weeks at a time then prime as long as you can stand. If you only leave your computer on for a few minutes at a time then 72 hours is probably a bit much. I generally use prime95 from 6-8 hours to determine stability. Also I like to use memtest86 to stress the memory on test #5 for about 30 minutes.....

 

[deathstar13]

burn ins do work for some products,some it doesnt do a thing.

id never leave my rig unattended tho while burning in tho.
i dont like prime much myself.


i like cpu stability test better.

 

[PCGUY112887]

Well should I just do it for stability testing for the 3 days i'm gone?

 

[Jiggahurtz]

I know my board auto shuts down when the cpu gets too hot if I have it enabled. You should check yours and set it to a temp and just let it burn if you want to be 100% prime stable. But prime is loosing its credibility as a stress test. I've been looking for something new just for a change but I haven't found much.

 

[Beavis]

I went on vacation a while back and left mine on running Prime, I was gone for 5 days and when I got back it looks like the computer restarted so it was just idle. It must have crashed at some point, maybe the power went out for a sec or Prime made it restarted, I'm not sure. Nothing burned up or anything so it's probably ok to leave it running if you have a good surge protector. I've got errors in Prime after 15 hours, long time to wait for an error.

 

[Airbornederekc]

i hate prime 95

 

[Lifthanger]

last night both test including ram crashed.. after I set my ram voltage to 2,8V all was fine.. I wouldn't have noticed this without prime95 (okok I would've noticed if the system crashed, but I think its nicer this way)

 

[PHILIP1193]

before thesystem n my rig was built, my amd 3000+ @ 2300Mhz wud orime fails in 3 mins but would fold for hours and hours once it folded for 7 days straight (holiday) and same goes for games, personally i just have built rig in sig and think that folding is enough for stability and i have left it on 2day just to get artic siler 5 to bed it a bit (temps drop supposidly for a after a while)

but basically i think prime has lost its place in a overclockers survival kit

Phil

 

[Lifthanger]

what does fold mean? My english is not very good.

 

[HousERaT]

"what does fold mean? My english is not very good."

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/

 

[Zebbo]

There's no use to prime three days. 24 hours is enough.

 

[Lifthanger]

ah I understand. But this folding surely has no errorchecking as every computation done by your machine is new to the network!?
what would you recommend as testing softwares for overclockers?

 

[HousERaT]

I use prime95 and memtest86 (for memory). If there's better software let's hear it. Basically what you want to do is see if your system will take stress to the cpu and memory. If you can survive lets say 8 hours of Prime95 then you're system is relatively stable.....