A Brief History of my PC stability

Until last week, I would have bet my new 3080 that my system (X99 + 5960X) overclocked to 4.6 was 100% stable. All other games and rendering stuff I use would NEVER crash the machine. I had some CTDs in FS2020 but some of them caused a BSOD or system re-boot from time to time.

Last week, I ran 3 sets of tools that torture the system for hours, memory, cpu, cache, disks and record temps, voltages, currents, fan speeds not a single glitch. But, still the odd hang every few days when using FS.

Of course, certain workloads may stress your PC in more ways that others dont. I think we called it the crysis effect, from that very game that 100% used every bit of silicon your chips had to offer. This sim is for sure one of those.

I downloaded the folding at home client yesterday which puts a huge pressure on pretty much all parts of your system, especially processor, caches, memory and GPU. An executable runs on both the CPU and the GPU. After 2 mins my CPU job stopped with an error (the software spots computational errors by the CPU as it doesn’t want them in complex protien folding data used for research).

I ran the same CPU client on my other PC, no probs it ran for 8 hours.

TL;DR - my cpu, although stable until the release of MSFS wasn’t actually stable. I had to move the vore (voltage of CPU) from 1.235 to 1.25 in small increments until the folding at home CPU client will run now for 24h without error.

Although i’ve had a couple of flight planning CTD’s in FS since, I have not had any reboots or machine lock ups. I had gaslight myself into thinking my PC was stable. I did downclock it for a day a few weeks ago but the problems with memory timing that caused put 10 years on me !

If you want to test your cpu and gpu stability and also want to turn in the odd folded protiens for science … https://foldingathome.org/

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