Tales From The Rags Side

[SCompRacer]

A "burn in." Just curious what you do to break a new PC in. Does it matter at all or just go to general use?

[paulcs]

Although people will argue about the benefits of burning in an overclocked CPU, most would agree that PC's should have a burn in period. Dell apparently does it (or at least that's the reason they give for not shipping right away), and I suspect most OEM's do it as well. I think it's at the very least prudent if not an outright necessity.

Of course, get ten people in a room and ask them what's the best program for burning in a system and you might very well get ten different answers.

I haven't really tried it yet, but the new Sandra has a burn-in utility included. Someone recently posted about a stability testing program called Stability Test. I can't find the thread, however.

Heavy duty distributed clients like Prime95 are popular for burning in and testing stability. SETI as a burn-in tool isn't as popular as it once was. To tell you the truth, I've seen SETI run fine on pretty unstable systems, and you want to test for stability as well as burn in your machine.

An old favorite is looping Brett "Three Fingers" Jacobs' Quake2 Crusher and Massive timedemos. Some people prefer doing this in software mode so their videocards don't do the lion's share of the work. UT is also popular because it's very CPU dependant.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net


[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 31 December 2000).]

[SCompRacer]

Thanks for the info. Got a reason for it now, got the Athlon going....yee-ha.

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Abit KT7 * 900MHz Athlon T'bird * 128MB Micron PC/133 RAM * Two Cheetah LVD's * Barracuda UW * DiamondMAX IDE * Plextor Ultraplex 40max/Plexwriter 12/4/32 * Hitachi IDE DVD * 2940U2W * SB Live * 3Com 905B-TX NIC * 3Com Courier V. Ext. * Hollywood + * Win 98SE, Win 2000 *

[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 31 December 2000).]

[Rags]

I use several things to test stability. First, I use SiSoft Sandra's burn in program, which I debate it's worthiness. Next, I use Prime95's scorcher. I also have a DVD I encode into divx using Flask while running Prime85 at the same time. I know there are others out there, but Prime95 and the general use I do really give me an idea of how well something is going to run.

Rags

[Greebe]

I run Q2 in software mode for 3-6 hours with all but the cpu fan disconnected, then in OGL hardware mode for the same... then test with Prime85 while doing a jig!

That'll weed out the little buggers if they are in there.