Testing the Tests – CPU Stability
The following is by Michael Turner, Guest Contributor to AlienBabelTech. He has kindly given us permission to publish his work. As with everything that we publish at AlienBabelTech, the opinions expressed are solely those of the individual writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and the opinions of the rest of the ABT staff.
— Leon Hyman, ABT Senior Editor.
This is my first review here and certainly not the last. I just wanted to start off by showing you some of the procedures I will be going through for subsequent reviews.
As many of you probably saw, I posted a thread hoping for a discussion on how you determine system stability and how you achieve that stability.
As we are hardware enthusiasts, we tend to have high end systems on which we depend on for our uses. I personally believe the days of the “average Joe” computer user are over. Sure we all have a computer of some sorts, but for us enthusiasts, a computer is not an OEM box with proprietary parts and a locked BIOS.
I’d like to discuss my thoughts about what a “stable” CPU means.
We all can agree that a stable computer is one that boots up, and can run whatever you throw at it without a hiccup. It’s understandable that there are flaws in operating system designs that may require (in)frequent reboots. Other than that, it’s a pretty subjective statement. You may be able to play a specific game at a certain frequency, but with another game – it fails.
My personal definition is this:
My computer must boot and provide a reliable and expected performance. It should never Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) or hard lock based on high loads. I should never have to down clock my CPU to play a game or do some benchmarking. Finally, which I believe is the most important; the computer should never have to throttle because of heat.
The last point is highly debatable, and rarely seen. Your computer will probably not BSOD due to throttling, but is it limiting performance and thus conflicts with my definition of stability. The reason why thermal throttling is rarely seen is because it is a by-product of extreme temperatures. These temperatures come from poor CPU coolers, including the stock cooler. As it’s been pointed out many times before – stock heat sink fan combos from a retail processor are never ideal. The reason why I wanted to add this little known fact in is shown here:
The effective clock should be 145×22=3190MHz, but instead I was being downclocked to 2169MHz. I understand that when you’re processing a task that doesn’t fully utilize all cores at 100% the overclock will be “stable,” but we’re not talking about situational stability. We’re talking about complete stability.
Um…. Your testing of OCCT was not very thorough… You should have tested on both small and large data sets. Large is easiest to pass while small is not.
Think I might have to pull out IBT and see how it runs on my 955. Can’t say I ever ran it, but between Prime95 and OCCT it took a rather long time for each test before moving on.
Fully agree on reliable and expected. If I turn on my computer overclocked; never have an issue but one test some where fails causing a BSOD; I just move on, since if its playing all the games I play with no issue’s and doesn’t randomly crash then it working well
@ Lord XeB
I realize your comment on the OCCT test not being very thorough. I agree that OCCT could probably be as sensitive as IBT was, but OCCT was very unclear on which test to use. A good addition to OCCT would be a clear definition of each test. Test Mode Small Data Set nets you “The test wont touch the RAM.” You can conclude two things from this:
1) Best test for CPU since it focuses only on this
2) Is as effective on the CPU as the other two, but doesn’t test the RAM
All 3 tests did eventually fail – but as my conclusion suggests, IBT did it the fastest. In fact, the amount of time it took for both OCCT and Prime95 to fail was greater than the time it took me to run 1 loop of IBT at 191-194. It doesn’t make the program better, but it does make it the fastest.
@ Micheal Turner
I completely agree. I am a (in)famous OCer over at OCN (mostly because I have habit of destroying graphics cards D:), but I am VERY thorough with my stress testing. If it an overclock does not pass 24 hours of prime (to be deemed 24/7 stable) and 50 runs of LinX (AKA a better GUI’ed version of LinX) with max memory (only works with 64-bit systems) I do not deem it stable. <.< Little ruthless on my poor Q6600 but I do not stand for system instability either.
Anywho, very nice guide BTW. And I do agree with you on OCCT. It does need to be clearer, but for reference, P95 during default stress testing is set at small data set (or small fft or whatever they are called).