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.
