Computer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread - Page 161

On December 21 2013 21:06 skyR wrote:
If you're in Canada then just wait for Boxing Week / Day. But if you can't wait a week and must buy now then you can get a Define R4 for like $80.

On December 22 2013 02:02 Ropid wrote:
MSI Afterburner is a program where you can tweak things about voltage and clock speeds of your GPU and the GPU's memory chips, also tweak the way the fans on the GPU react to temperature increases. It wants to run at Windows start-up and will show up as an icon in the notification area of the task-bar.

Prime95, you should probably not use anymore on Haswell CPUs! Haswell introduced "AVX2" instructions and improvements to the older "AVX". Programs using that stuff can squeeze a lot more performance out of the CPU than what was previously possible. The extra performance does not magically come free and will produce a lot of heat compared to past CPUs. That's a problem in prime95 in its stress test mode as it is not behaving like a normal program that only occasionally throws in some AVX instructions instead of using them continuously back-to-back.

Additionally, I feel prime95 is not that good to prove stability. Despite it running without crashing the PC, you might still see crashes in normal use. That was different in the past.

x264 is great because it's actually a normal program and using AVX for something useful. This is what you should use.

Heaven is great for seeing if the GPU works right. In my experience, it's about the hottest the GPU can get for normal stuff.

I don't feel comfortable to suggest anything to use as I don't know any program that works well to show stability. A current chess engine seems to work great but that might take some annoying research to set up.

The best proof of stability in my mind would be to just use the PC for games and stuff for hours for several days and see what happens. This means I do not have anything good to suggest for what to do if you build a PC for someone else. :/