Yes, Prime95 is overkill. It's just an "upper limit" of stress. If the CPU can cope with it, it will be fine in any other situation (or at least that's how I understood it).

 

 

 

Sorry but no not really. As I said, you can be 100% stable in Prime95  and then as soon as you run Handbrake BSOD immediately. Happened to me with BF4, twice. 100% stable in Prime, crashed in BF4. More voltage did the trick.

 

Both Asus and Intel are of the opinion that we should concern ourselves with stability that relates to "the software we run" not an artificial, synthetic stress test. Stability is relevant to the applications we run.

 

Take AVX instruction sets for example... you can have an overclocked system that crashes when you run AVX, however runs COD, BF4, FSX or whatever else you favour in a stable fashion. So if you never run stress tests that run AVX, or professional applications like Adobe Premier that run AVX, all is well and you have a system that's stable. Precisely why Asus 5 Way Optimisation gives you the option to stress with AVX or without. 

 

I'm not saying never run Prime95 if it's your thing, just that there are other stress test utilities out there that are more realistic, more akin to how we all use our PC's 24/7. That's why I would Favour RealBench, it's designed to simulate real world use, not artificial rarely used scenarios like Prime95.

 

We build FSX. P3D, BF4, COD PC's... not Prime95 dedicated PC's.

 

As Is said, "I wouldn't recommend"... my opinion, just happens to be the same as Intel's and Asus's opinion. Everyone is free to make up their own mind though.

Thanks Martin! Learnt something new!