What is prime 95 and why do I want it?

[Inquisitive Builder]

Title says it all. I've heard about it several places and wondered what the benefits of it were and if it was safe.

 

[getochkn]

It's used to find big prime numbers. The reason people use it, is that it will use every available core and ghz of your PC to do this. The benefit of this from a pc builders point of view is that will tax the system running full out, and if it crashed or your PC blue screens, etc, you may have a heating problem, etc. It's used a lot in overclocking to push the CPU to its limits.

Unless your testing a new system and want to "burn it in" or doing massive overclocking or just care about prime numbers that much, you don't need it.

 

[oczdude8]

it is safe.

The purpose of prime 95 is to stress test your cpu and ram to see if they are unstable due to OCing. it will cause your cpu temps to go to their highest level that you will ever get, since it stresses your cpu to its max. If you are not OCing , forget it.

if you are OCing, making sure you are using a good aftermarket cpu cooling before using prime 95, because you can easily damage your cpu if it gets too hot.

If you have no idea what OCing is, also don't worry about prime 95, it provides nothing useful to a standard user

 

[Eximo]

Prime95 is now a standard benchmarking/stress testing tool. The original concept was to slow down CPUs for older programs without speed limiters. Basically just makes your computer try to solve for prime numbers.

These days overclockers use it to load their CPUs to confirm they are stable at high voltages/clocks and to see what the max temperatures reached are.

It is by no means a 'safe' application. If your CPU does not have adequate cooling, Prime95 can cause your computer to overheat. Normally this will just cause a unexpected reboot, but prolonged overheating can damage your CPU/motherboard.

It is falling out of favor as a stressing tool because it doesn't utilize every part of a CPU simultaneously.