Originally posted by: TrevorRC
An Opteron 165 can calculate 10,500 MTOPS [Millions of Theoretical Operations Per Second].
60 seconds in a minute.
60 minutes in an hour.
8 hours...
3.024x10^8 power
[302400000] Calculations in that time.
If one fails...it'll be corrected by ANY error checking done... if it's done involving a windows install... that odd will never come up. If it does, it will be repaired.
Just something I figured I'd mention.
[On a different note, it's advisable to turn off all overclocks whenever doing anything requiring absolute-accuracy--and no, I'm not talking about Folding. I'm talking about altering your BIOS in windows (Which has a built in error-checker, might I add...), or anything along those lines].
Stability is different for different people.
8 hours generally does it. If it happens after that, it is such a rare occurence that if it does happen, the file will be overwritten eventually before the odds come up again.
--Trevor
You know, I have to disagree with that. How many times have you had windows blue screen randomly, while playing a game, or listening to music, or just copying some files(or just sitting there reading a webpage)? And 'the file will be overwritten eventually before the odds come up again'... ???
I got tired of that. Also, if Prime95 detects an error, it is because it GOT PAST any 'error checking' that might correct it. Prime95 doesn't do any magic, it just asks the CPU to calculate some prime #s, and compares what the CPU says to a known-accurate list. It asks the CPU to do that THROUGH windows, so it goes through the same error checking any other programs go through before it sees its data.
If you get Prime95 errors, your CPU is unstable.
Now, Windows might run fine for a few hours or days, even when prime95 craps out after a few minutes. I don't want my gaming to be interrupted by a BSOD, I don't want my files corrupted by windows crashing at an inoportune moment. Until a RAM slot on my motherboard went bad, I had 0 hard locks, and 0 blue screens for 15 months. 3 of those months were without any reboots at all. If you shut down your computer every day, and don't need much long-term stability, 6-12 hours of prime95 is probably plenty. If you want your system to NEVER Crash, 24+ hours is a good idea... more is better if you can stand it.
Prime95 won't test your whole system though, or even your whole CPU. It mostly hits the floating point units hard, and the SSE units if your system supports SSE2. I go for 24+ hours of prime95 stability, plus perfect gaming/etc stability at the same time.
If you are OK with random crashes, hard locks, etc.. you can assume a system is safe after a few hours of prime95. Personally, I want more from a system I paid a good bit of money for, especially since you don't need to sacrifice anything to get perfect stability (My current 1.8 Ghz opty is up to 22 hours of prime95 at 2.3 Ghz. I hope to bump it at LEAST to 2.4 w/ better cooling.. maybe.)