Okay, this is the last "OT" post I'll make for a while, since I know it bothers some folks on this board. It's just that I've been busy with this switchover to a new processor chip these past few days, and I've learned a few things that hopefully will be useful to others.
When you render video and/or when you try to push the envelope by overclocking, you put heat stress on your computer components, particularly the CPU chip. There are numerous ways to test your CPU chip in advance, just to make sure it won't fail at an inopportune moment. One of the most popular ways is with a program called Prime95.
Prime95 was originally designed to be a distributed-processing project like SETI@home. Rather than search for signs of intelligent life in the cosmos, Prime95 is designed to search for ever-larger prime numbers (you know, numbers that can't be divided by other numbers--like 7, 11, or 13). Along the way, hackers discovered that the program really heated up the CPU chip because of all the math operations, and it became a sort of defacto stability test that really pushed the CPU to the limits.
One of the major benefits of Prime95 is that it not only will work the CPU hard, but it will also tell you when something fails. It does this by comparing answers it gets with known answers.
There are some problems with using Prime95, though. For one thing, it was not meant for just stress testing, and the interface clearly shows it--it's a nonintuitive mess.
Earlier today I came across a freeware Prime95 variation called "Stress Prime 2004." SP2004 uses the same free code base of Prime95, but puts it in a clean interface, and also automatically runs both processors in a dual-core setup like mine. It has numerous other advantages that I won't lay out here, but trust me, go get a copy of it if you want to test your system. By the way, in almost every situation, you won't "break" your system if it fails--it just means it's being pushed too hard under the circumstances. In any event, all of us here are already asking a lot of these systems, since video rendering is a challenging task also.
You can get the original Prime95 here.
You can get the really cool SP2004 alternative here.
When you render video and/or when you try to push the envelope by overclocking, you put heat stress on your computer components, particularly the CPU chip. There are numerous ways to test your CPU chip in advance, just to make sure it won't fail at an inopportune moment. One of the most popular ways is with a program called Prime95.
Prime95 was originally designed to be a distributed-processing project like SETI@home. Rather than search for signs of intelligent life in the cosmos, Prime95 is designed to search for ever-larger prime numbers (you know, numbers that can't be divided by other numbers--like 7, 11, or 13). Along the way, hackers discovered that the program really heated up the CPU chip because of all the math operations, and it became a sort of defacto stability test that really pushed the CPU to the limits.
One of the major benefits of Prime95 is that it not only will work the CPU hard, but it will also tell you when something fails. It does this by comparing answers it gets with known answers.
There are some problems with using Prime95, though. For one thing, it was not meant for just stress testing, and the interface clearly shows it--it's a nonintuitive mess.
Earlier today I came across a freeware Prime95 variation called "Stress Prime 2004." SP2004 uses the same free code base of Prime95, but puts it in a clean interface, and also automatically runs both processors in a dual-core setup like mine. It has numerous other advantages that I won't lay out here, but trust me, go get a copy of it if you want to test your system. By the way, in almost every situation, you won't "break" your system if it fails--it just means it's being pushed too hard under the circumstances. In any event, all of us here are already asking a lot of these systems, since video rendering is a challenging task also.
You can get the original Prime95 here.
You can get the really cool SP2004 alternative here.