EVERYBODY should do prime95 torture test

[DDogg]

I started having some problems in the transcoding phase of BeSweet. CCE was rock solid on my machine so I thought it must be a problem in BeSweet or D2S. Anyway, after much thrashing about on my part, I dug out my copy of Prime95 and started the torture test. I had of course done this before several months ago when I changed motherboards. Everything was fine then, but something must have changed. Much to my surprise it showed an error in the first few seconds. I then reduced my FSB speed and my machine is again rock solid.

Moral of this story is even if you think your machine is solid you should run the torture test portion of Prime95 on a regular basis to re check your machine for computational errors. The Prime95 torture test is the easiest way to "certify" your machine. The regular portion of Prime 95 will NOT show the error. You must go to the option menu to engage the torture test.

Get it here:

ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v21.zip

or

ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v21.exe

[smiller667]

It can go the other way around as well: a recent post on a different board stated that prime95 did not give any errors on repeated runs - yet CCE would contiuously crash. It proved to be faulty RAM - afterwards the encoding went fine (all on a non-o/c'ed system).

[DDogg]

smiller667, thanks for that tip as I had not seen that thread. Interesting indeed. So I guess our moral is now: your machine is rock solid for sure if both CCE and the Prime95 torture test will run for a day without error.

[Dropbear]

Don't forget to go into the Options part of Prime95 and configure it for the type of CPU you have, as well as the amount of RAM you want it to use.. (be generous - the idea is to find errors here, not to brag about 'clean slates')..

[M1ckey M0use]

Maybe another tip then. Use memtest86 to find memory errors. This free program is stored on a bootable floppy that tests your memory very good.

More info on:
http://www.teresaudio.com/memtest86/

M.

[MotoX71]

I did the prime95 torture test with burnintest running also for 2+ days and found no sign of errors. For the past 2 months I have been having problems with cce crashing, after the vaf file, first pass, second pass, pretty much whenever it wanted to.

I only had access to two dvds for a few weeks so I kept trying different settings within dvd2svcd and all the suggestions that came from the various posts. Last week I figured out that the rip of the vob files to the hd were bad, they had a skip when watching them with windvd, about 1 sec or less of a different scene was played. I moved my dvd reader off a promise ide controller and recopied the vob files to the hd, abet a different dvd. Now I finally converted my first dvd successfully!

A corrupted vob file on the hd might be a source of the cce problems if the comp is stable. I'm thinking of putting my dvd player back on the ide card and see if dvd2svcd will work successfully, but it already takes a day to convert one on this slow pile.

Thanks all for your help and that's my 2 cents

MotoX71

[chainsaw135]

@MotoX71

Well thats good you have figured out the reason for you're cce issues and have seemed to fix your problem. That just shows so many factors are involved in the cce crashing, which is frustrating to say the least . I know DVD2SVCD and the Mods have done a great job helping all of us with this and Other issues, so my hats off to you guys Thanks...

[DVDHack]

I think I've had the computer from hell and I have found a number of things in trying to resolve my problems.

Freezing on pass chenges doesn't seem to have anything to do with stability. i.e. 33%, 66% on 3 pass VBR

Other freezes seem to be stability related.

These have been my issues:

Prime 95 also stresses the Swap file, I had a problem here
If your hard drive has a propensity to 'lose' data - you can get bad vobs - the symptoms are just like an unstable PC
To isolate a problem to either CPU, memory or HD - try turning your swap file off - if the problem is still there, the problems with your CPU or Mem. If the probelm is gome it could be your swap file. If you suspect a particular HD try putting your swapfile on that and run prime95.
Running prime95 once for 24 hours can be misleading - I successfully ran prime95 for 26 hours and had CCE crash - running prime95 again caused a fail at 14 mins.
I believe the best approach if you have two drives is to have the swap on one and the VOBs on another. I don't use a swap at all now.

Hope this helps a little.

[DDogg]

This is SUCH a bitch of a problem to pinpoint..Arghhhhhhh!

[Dropbear]

I'll point everyone to my thread in Basic Topics about "CCE not starting".. It appears I was wrong. It can appear that the encoding process does not start when ever CCE crashes out mid-encode.

I have recently tweaked my overclocking upwards and I think I have gone over the edge of stability at some stage. I did do a Prime95 torture test for a number of hours, but it looks as though you should let it run for at least as long as it takes to do an average encode.

I'd like to second the notion that while prime95 will test your memory and cpu systems quite well (better than stand alone memory testers in most cases), it does not stress test your IDE system - this should be tested as a separate issue.