When it comes to testing overclocked hardware, there's a plethora of programs that claim to push it to the limits, but few are so good at testing CPU, memory and chipset at the same time. Prime95 is used to find Mersenne Prime numbers, but what you should care about is it's ability to expose bad CPU cooling (bad case cooling in general) or an excess in overclocking.
The torture test runs continuously, comparing your computer's results to results that are known to be correct. Any mismatch and you've got a problem! Well, at least that's what they say. In my experience, a 99.9% stable OC will give you an error in just a few minutes. Otherwise perfectly stable machines will fall sooner or later after hours of torture. Only standar settings (or the best of OCs) under good cooling conditions will pass with flying colors.
At last, Version 25.3 of prime95 brings (among other features) the option to run multiple LL tests within a single prime95 instance. There is no longer a need to copy the ".exe" to another directory so you can run multiple instances for torturing that multi-cpu machine of yours. The dialog box now lets you choose how many CPUs or cores you want to stress.
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