New CPU or Boat Anchor

[Peter Arremann]

On Friday 06 January 2006 03:41, Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 19:51 -0800, Kam Leo wrote:
> > Memtest does not test your entire system. The cpu, hard drive and
> > graphics display are not being stressed at the same time as the
> > memory.
>
> I'd say that the CPU does get some stressing.  It's doing the work,
> after all, and it does get quite hot while running memtest.

You're correct that the CPU has to do a lot of work (and heats up quite a bit) 
when doing a mem test because it has to initiate all the load/stores. In case 
of an AMD64 based system, the memory controller is even on the CPU.

memtest however still does not count as a CPU test because most of the paths 
inside the CPU (other than what is needed for memory access) aren't well 
tested. You can have a faulty CPU that works great with memory access but 
produces errors when you do a lot of floating point work. or SSE. or... 

Peter.