it’s also a terrible stability test these days for the same reasons Wendell talks about with cinebench in his video with Ian (and Ian agrees too). Doesn’t work like 90% of the chip - it’s purely a cache/avx benchmark. You can have a completely unstable frontend and it’ll just work fine because prime95 fits in icache and doesn’t need the decoder, and it’s just vector op, vector op, vector op forever.
You can have a system that’s 24/7 prime95 stable that crashes as soon as you exit out, because it tests so very little of it. That’s actually not uncommon due to the changes in frequency state that happen once the chip idles down… and it’s been this way for more than a decade, speedstep used to be one of the things overclockers would turn off because it posed so many problems vs just a stable constant frequency load.
Prime95 also completely ignores the high-clock domain btw so it can also be completely prime95 stable yet fail completely on a routine task that boosts up! So it’s technically not even a full test of core stability either.
You can have a system that’s 24/7 prime95 stable that crashes as soon as you exit out, because it tests so very little of it. That’s actually not uncommon due to the changes in frequency state that happen once the chip idles down… and it’s been this way for more than a decade, speedstep used to be one of the things overclockers would turn off because it posed so many problems vs just a stable constant frequency load.