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On Wed, 2010-03-17 at 07:41 +0000, tom wrote: > And I'm not making myself clear. > Its a one core steam driven machine. With F@h running the machine always > uses 100% cpu. So cpuburn/prime etc dont work the machine any harder. I don't think we're in disagreement here! Anyway... On Wed, 2010-03-17 at 08:58 +0000, tom wrote: > Its (f@h) a big FP maths problem. It does provide some info but 'just > gone wrong- shouldn't be here' is about all it can realistically manage. > I run a lot of spice sims which dont fail unexpectedly and are almost > pure number crunching. Its just f@h fails on this machine - and not the > others... > If anyone knows of an FPU checker - ie it knows what the result should > be before asking? > Tom te tom te tom Do you *know* there aren't occasional small errors in your space sims? Do you have any way of telling that your machine never occasionally writes corrupted/wrong data to disk? Unexpected failure is not the only symptom of a problem and is by no means guaranteed to happen if your CPU hiccups. As previously stated, Prime95 will calculate Mersenne primes for you and then compare with the known answer - it does a lot of floating point calculations and you will see when it gets one wrong, it won't just halt. The longer you run tools like this without an error, the more sure you can be of system stability. More details on Prime95 here: http://www.mersenne.org/ At the end of the day it comes down to your definition of a stable system and what you're happy with. Some CPUs can run Prime95 for 24+ hours before getting an error - whether that system is stable or not is a matter of opinion. By then you're probably beyond point where the manufacturer would bin the chip as faulty if it was new - or it may be that with another tool the problem would manifest itself sooner. All I would say is that if you keep getting errors from F@H and don't find a fix, then it wouldn't be ethical or useful to keep running it on that machine. Best wishes Dan -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html