Yea i agree. I dont feel that you need to stress test for long periods of time just enough to make sure your voltages are correct and you system is stable.
I ran Prime95 a little bit longer then normal to make sure this E8500 was stable plus like i said i might game for 3 hours consistently and that would be the only time that my cpu might be at full load for an extended period of time.
I know when i would first start upping the FSB and vcore on the E6550 and the E8500 it usually wouldnt be stable and it would take me a few hours to get the correct settings. I would change some settings and then see if it would boot into windows and both CPU's would seem stable and would run fine opening programs but they weren't stable at all. I think one reason is that just opening programs or internet doesnt bring your CPU usage even close to 100%, maybe like 30% and its only at that usage for a second.
You need a stress test so that CPU usage is at a constant 100% while monitoring CPU-z to see how much vdroop you have at full load. Majority of the time my comp would be fine with opening the internet and programs but as soon as a stress test put a full load on it, core 1 would fail in prime95.
Even after having prime95 run for an hour i would start to think it was stable and then at 1hour 15min core 1 would fail again. So i would have to go back and up vcore 1-2 notches until i was finally able to get it to run fully stable for 3 hours.
But once you get all the voltages set correctly, your now able to use your comp as you please with out any worry of something getting damaged or sudden crashes/BSOD's
