Stress Test. What is "enough"?

[Texun]

What would you consider a satisfactory Burn-in test to determine system stability? Fire it up and let her rip, SETI, Sandra, Winbench, game demos or any combination of these at the same time?

I recently built a dual system running PIII's and W2K that will pull a truck.... for a while. Anytime during a burn from 1 to 5 hours with all temps below 40C it will go to a hard freeze. Haven't used it enough under normal conditions yet to know if it is a stress problem or just something flaking out intermittently. Swapping RAM now and checking if that's the cause. Nothing in the event viewer shows up at the time of lock up.

 

[putzman]

I am a personal fan of Prime95... It flunked my rig when I was trying to o/c, when 3dmark and sandra worked flawlessly... As the readme says though, prime95 might reveal errors that would go unnoticed with most normal usage... But I am super anal, and I like to know that my hardware is 'infallible' (or atleast as much as possible)... if u can run prime95's torture test for 24 hours (without errors), then you should feel secure...

 

[ChampionAtTufshop]

memtest86 for the ram as well

 

[CrazySaint]

I stress tested my system with Prime95 for 12 hours with no errors, then started running my DC projects (Distributed Folding and Seventeen or Bust) both of which would stop and give me an error after 6-15 hours of useage, so I had to back off my OC a bit even though *none* of my other apps were having any trouble whatsoever. So, if you *really* wanna stress test your system, run Distributed folding for a few days (be sure to join TeAm AnandTech first, though! ) - and hey, its for a good cause!

 

[Rand]

Prime95 for 24hrs + MemTest86 for RAM, followed by a variety of 3D games looping for a few hours.
A linux kernel compilation may be worth it as while as a final test of stability.

I don't bother with Sandra, WinBench, SETI, or 3DMark as none have shown themselves to consistently crash an otherwise rock solid system.

 

[Dreadogg]

SHOW NO MERCY

 

[The Sauce]

Prime95 only stresses the arithmetic part of the cpu which is not a good reflection of heavy use under multimedia applications. To stress the CPU i run Sandra Burn-in utility looping the arithmetic/multimed CPU benches. To stress the video card I loop 3dMark. And to stress the system bus and memory I loop the Sandra Burn-In utility looping the memory benches. This is a good way to stress components individually and see where the weak link is.