groovesalad1 :
jjd99d :
Prime95 24 hours is accepted as stable with the O.C. community as stated and accepted in Wikipedia. But after all it's your computer. If your happy with it telling you 2+2=1 then live with it. I just hope I don't ever get any data or torrents that have been on your system. Can you say "Data Corruption"
1."Data Corruption?" If you dont want the possibility of corrupt data on your computer, why do you so easily and willingly accept that same possibility of corrupt data in your research? you cited wikipedia as a source. the website written by the users. The majority of it is well written, and most likely written by one or many individuals very knowledgeable on the subject. Though very useful, its not sufficient to be blindly accepted as fact. Especially not by any sort of specialists. Assuming those you called the O.C community are experienced and know this stuff better than myself and most of the world, it's probably safe to say they dont spend much time on wikipedia. They specialize in this area, and would use a more reputable organization/website/forum/media, etc... for their purposes. You dont learn authentic mexican food by eating at taco bell...
2.Then, you belittled somebody else's opinion by comparing it with extreme oversimplification and, I'm going out on a limb here, obviously false. I'm not calling myself an expert in any way. I just built my first computer recently. Had no idea what a burn-in was or how to stress test. The computer I built is way overkill for the gaming I do. I ran prime95 for 25 mins and called that good enough. So far, it's proven to do more than miscalculate 2+2 and empty my wallet.
Ha lots of people on this thread a bit too desperate for high overclocks. Been there done that when I was a few years younger, now I just accept that some chips are better than others and I don't have the cash to keep buying chip after chip for the sake of an extra few 100 MHz like people getting up towards 5GHz must do (either that or they've had a lot more luck than me, every single time I've OC'ed).
No one is telling you not to run an unstable system, just don't get upset when you find bits of your mp3 albums get skipped over and your large rar's, avi's etc suddenly don't work etc etc etc.
People posting that they don't get BSODs: just because it doesn't kill your whole session doesn't mean that the processor is functioning 100% correctly. It's getting through 4-5 x 10^9 cycles every second (ok well full load it is at least) so if you have a 0.001% malfunction rate the number of errors is still immense. You might not see it or care about it in normal usage but trust me you will see it in the data you're storing, especially after running unstable for 6 months+.
I've just been OCing for the first time in a while, got it decent now and done a check of my main array. 16 inconsistencies found already from a single afternoon of fiddling and it's only halfway there. If you don't have a mirror / parity to check against, that kind of corruption is now stuck on your hard drive forever and you can only hope it's not killed anything important (for the record as all decent OCing guides should say right at the top btw, keep your OCing confined to a dummy bare OS that you can sacrifice then plug your proper drive(s) back in once it's stable). The idea of running 24/7 like that (my configs were final tweaks with prime running stable for 6 hours before failing here, nothing heavy) with any kind of valuable data is not something I would ever consider.
Letting go emotionally of your hopes of getting near 5GHz after splashing the cash might be hard but having experienced both, I am firmly of the opinion that data loss is far far worse.
Groovesalad1, in the same post you say you've got little to no experience but then you're getting argumentative with jjd99d in a quite nonsensical fashion. Yes wikipedia isn't much of a source but the point is that 24h is a generally accepted standard from experienced overclockers. That is just a simple fact that you can't argue over, wherever it's written. It might not be a perfect test but statistically consistently passing 24h is a hell of a lot better than failing every 4-6h.
And the 2+2=1 point may be simplified in a way but in essence it's completely correct. Your CPU is pretty much an overly complicated calculator, entirely based on mathematical functions. The data your system is built on (whether you're talking about the stuff you're running and experiencing on your screen or the data on your HDD, network traffic etc at a more fundemental level) all goes through it, and if it's demonstrably unstable, it is spewing out a hell of a lot of wrong numbers ala 2+2=1 which will have a magnified effect in complex data, which really ain't great mate.
And the only way to verify stability is to process data (e.g complicated prime calculations) through it, see what comes out and then verify the answers against known correct data. This picks out slight miscalculations which will screw up a few bits and bytes hither and thither, but may not crash your computer. For the record there are probably better soak tests to do than prime95 as it's not that comprehensive, it's better as a max heat test more than anything, although whether you could ever work a multi-core cpu to get that hot in normal usage outside of some professional workstation stuff is also questionable imo, I tend to use normal stress test temps as the max as I know I won't ever really max out 6 cores for more than a tiny while.
HTH