Frequently Asked Question 05

Why is "stability" talked about so much on different boards?

One has to understand that overclocking, by definition, is "forcing" a computer to exceed its intended designed specifications. Imagine trying to modify the engine of your car to make it accelerate much faster. There could be consequences associated with tampering with your engine. It could lead to something innocuous, such as your car stalling out at idling RPMs, or it could lead to something potentially fatal, like having the car speed out of control because the accelerator ends up sticking to the floor.

Whether your car stalled, or your car set a new 0-60 MPH acceleration test record before sending the driver to the hospital, both would be described as "automobile instabilities."

Stability for everyday use is one of the most important considerations we look at when designing our systems. Overclockers can setup and run a computer that can reach speeds that are only good for a split second using the more extreme cooling methods. These speeds would not be practical for computers that must run for hours, days, or weeks at a time.

From the perspective of overclocking, all CPUs were not created equal. Some can run very fast using less sophisticated air cooling methods, but they fall apart when extreme cooling solutions are applied. In some instances, the reverse is also true. This adds to the complexity of creating long term stability. You must select a CPU that can perform well for extended periods of time.

There are many different programs that we use to test and benchmark the speeds of our computer systems. Some of these are designed to stress different components of the system. One such application is called Prime95. This program "stresses" the CPU and all of its internal cores under what is commonly referred to as a "100% load." We run Prime95 for extended periods of time to verify that a system is stable before the customer receives it. You can read more about Prime95 here at the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search website.

There are different kinds of instabilities: bootup (or disk loading) instabilities, CPU instabilities, BIOS instabilities, BUS instabilities, etc. Each of them may either advertise themselves very plainly, or remain lurking, waiting for the most inopertune moment to present the user with an undesired situation (like a sudden shutdown or restart before you saved your work).

All of the systems built by the Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking team have been stress-tested against proven diagnostic software aimed at catching even the most minute traces of potential instabilities. Our box builders send our reports, and other feedback, directly to the chip manufacturers. In return, the manufacturers insure that we get the most stable releases (identified by the batch number) of their various chipsets. This means, more than likely, our systems are even more stable than the mass-marketed computers that are for sale at your local computer store.

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