Mersenne: Torture test passes but normal use fails!

[David Jaggard]

Dear Mailing List,   Could somebody give me some advice?   I have an overclocked AMD Duron machine using windows 98SE running at just under 1GHz and have been running prime95 v20 successfully for many months. I have occasionally had hardware errors when I have tried to overclock further but at the current speed prime95 v20 is happy.   Yesterday (11-09-2001) I upgraded prime95 from v20 to v21. My tests ressumed only to quickly fail with a SUMOUT/possible hardware failure. I made some small changes to speed and core voltage but could not correct the errors. I decided to run the torture test and I left it running all night. This morning I viewed results.txt and all tests had passed yet the normal operation of the program still fails. Surely if my system was unstable the torture test should fail! Is it possible that in the new release the normal primality tests are more stressful than the torture test? Or is there a bug?   On a seperate matter why is there no processor catagory for AMD Duron chips and yet there is a catagory for Intel Celerons? I'm proud of the fact that my budget setup is faster than some ready-made Athlon 1GHz systems!   Thanks in advance for any feedback   Davy