How do you test stability?

[brian_riendeau]

I am looking for some ways to test stability on a friends up and coming computer that is likely to be an overclocked Celeron II or Pentium 3. I would be building the system for them and it has to be stable beyond any doubt. I would build her a Duron but some people are anti AMD and I am not going to argue with them when they just will not listen.

Anyway, for the most part, I use Prime95 and let it run for at least 48 hours on torture test. Once it passes that, I deem the CPU stable. I tried 3DMark2000 but it dumps me to the desktop at speeds I know are stable so I stopped using it. What is everyone here using to ensure the stailibty of their CPU?

 

[rickn]

3dmark 2000, quake3 are bad to use because they both have memory leaks.


Dagoth Moor Zoological demo would be ok, as well as SETI@home to test cpu stability

 

[AL77]

Both 3dMark 2000 and Quake3 (looped) run fine for me (not one crash) on my friend's p3-600EB (p3v4x, v3-2000) non-overclocked system that I built. I don't know why people have 3dMark 2000 crashing on them with default cpu speeds, unless it has to do with the videocard. I think these are good tests for stability. Try looping Quake3 for couple of hours.

Also, I think I read on Tom's Hardware something about Sysmark being a good stability indicator.

BTW, what is Prime 95, and where can it be downloaded.

Regards,
Al

 

[Sparky Anderson]

3DMark also drops on me at stable speeds...My PC is a P3 450 running at 558 (124 MHz FSB) and will not get past 4 or 5 tests on 3dmark....yet back at 450 MHz it runs fine. 558 is stable though...I've run it for almost a year.

 

[damien6]

AL77

Prime95 is another great program to test out the cpu stability in a system. You can get it here:

http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm

 

[damien6]

hmmmm. Their site seems to be down.

 

[chottoed]

i agree... prime95....
when running 3dmark... sometimes the loops just craps out.. it's a bug ... the patch they offer may fix it tho...
or you could run the good ol' q2 crusher demo and loop that

 

[DeadlyKnight]

i think i will go get that torture test also

 

[rigor]

3dmark 2000 v1.1 tests both cpu (and extended 3dnow/SSE) and video card stability best.

Q3arena is undoubtably a great torture test as well.

Make sure you have the newest versions.

Also compiling several programs on LINUX or FREEBSD simultaneously, like the kernel, will stress the cpu/memory/harddrive subsystem. Linux kernel building used to be a standard to test my system stability, and IT WILL seg-fault (6 or 11) easily when pushing an unstable system. It's important to run enough GCC compile makes to start swapping hard, this will push the cpu/memory/disk io subsystem to its limits unlike the two above tests.

 

[kyoshozx]

I agree that 3dmark isn't a great torture test.
Seti and Q3 is good....

 

[Strafe]

Anyone have any opinions on CPU Stability Test? I have never been able to get it to run successfully for more than an hour or so before crashing. I'm pretty sure my system is stable 'tho. I've heard other people complain that its buggy.

 

[rigor]

ive run cpu stability test for 12 hours straight on a 366 to 550 with rc5 running in the background. rock solid.

win98 64 megs of ram celeron 366->550

 

[Eug]

I can run those CPU burn-in programs forever with no crashes, but if I throw some video stuff on top of that on a non-overclocked vid card, the computer will crash until I tone down the overclocking a bit. For this reason I feel that programs like Prime95 or CPU burn-in programs if run alone are insufficient as stability testers. Indeed, several people on this site have stated they can run Seti for days on end, but as soon as they start doing heavy duty gaming for longer than half an hour, their system acts erratically, even with non-overclocked video cards. 3DMark2000 is only good if you loop it since it only takes 5 minutes to run. (People have had problems with it though... I think because many of their systems are not truly stable, but probably some problems might be due to bugs. There is a new version 1.1 however, that may correct some problems.)

I like BurnBX and BurnP6 together, running simultaneously with Unreal Tournament flyby, overnight... then followed by 3DMark2000 looped several times. That's what I consider stable. Prime95 alone just doesn't cut it.

Another severe torture test is running a looped Q3A demo001 for several hours, using a downloaded hack. However, I find it tests the video more than anything else.

 

[Ulysses]

I saw the following at Giga-Byte in a section about 'burning in':

"You'll get a good idea of how stable your system is during this "testing". All other things being equal, there should be NO "hangs" or "lock-ups". There may however be some places during the testing that the benchmark stops because an "error" it detected. Such stops typically have NO relation to the stability of the system. They are usually related to the version of video driver you are using. FYI, frequently the driver that ships with graphics accelerators today will be older than the driver for that card as posted on the vendor's web site. One reason new drivers are provided is to fix problems in running the ZD benchmarks. So if you get an error message when running the benchmark, frequently the problem can be resolved by downloading and installing the latest driver. [Further note - if you are still getting the benchmark error after installing the latest driver, check the vendor's web site again, You may have downloaded a performance driver which is incompatible with the benchmark. If one is listed, download and install the WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) driver.]"

 

[Eug]

True. The first video driver I had with my Voodoo didn't seem to like 3DMark, but it was also contaminated with ATI stuff at the time.

 

[xtreme2k]

u need a program that test different components of your system

Q3 all day doesn't mean ur computer is 100% stable since the hdd/cpu/fpu aren't stressed too much

Prime all day doesn't mean 100% stable also since 3d and hdd not stressed at all

you must run different program stressing out each components to test stability

i guess Q2 Crusher in software rendering mode + prime pretty much stress your system out

 

[seungboy]

hello,

How do you loop the 3dmark and the quake demos?
I just got a Cel566 @850 and would like to test it for stability.

Thanks
-seung

 

[Lord Gwynz]

Also a quick method I use to determine if something is amiss is by doing an archive integrity test on several +100 meg sized .zip files using Winzip. CRC errors are bound to show up if the CPU is unstable.

 

[AL77]

seungboy, I don't know the loop procedure for 3dMark 2000 as I don't have that program on my system, but for Quake 3 check this link out: http://forums.anandtech.com/arcmessageview.cfm?catid=33&threadid=116900

 

[Aboroth]

In the BurnBX documention it says not to run it with other programs because that would actually make the system less stressed. This is supposed to be because the program already stresses as much as possible, I think. Well, thats what the Readme says.

 

[Hyper99]

Stability is when everything that you run do not crashes including
Quake3d, age of empire II, etc
whatever you like.
running prime95 takes forever and does not help me to solve my
stability problem.
for example play mp3 files
and run anything that you enjoy that normally don't crashes
and see if it does.
The best stability test would be to run a game
called Age of empire II
it will alway crashes on a buggy cpu
It torture the cpu alot
run it for 30min and if it crashes say 10-15min,
you know right away.
Cool huh?
also do this
pkzip a huge files about 10-30meg
then do a test to see if you got any errors
to insure bugless cpu even further.
If you don't have full version AOEII , the demo game will also do

 

[Zucchini]

Surfing the web with internet explorer also is a good way to see if ur comp is stable If somethings gonna go down, you can be sure it'll be ie5

 

[compuwiz1]

Prime95 is fine, but not by itself. I prefer to run it and Final Reality looped simultaneously. http://www.remedy-ent.com/fr/
They are both older programs, but work fine for this purpose. If you can pass 10 hours of both, you're gonna be fine with whatever you throw at it. 3Dmark2000 has it's own erratic behaviour and cannot be relied upon.

 

[BlazingSaddles]

there isn't any demos you can run with the quake3 demo right?

 

[goog40]

I want to join seti. Can someone give me a link to their team's page for me to sign up? Also, what's rc5?