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Is it still necessary to break in / burn in newly built computers?  If so, any recommendations?  Found in in SiSoft Sandra, any other recommendations?

Necessary to do what with what?

Sounds like an urban myth to me.


Edit: Ah, the wonders of the internet search. It means stress testing the components. Its always smart to do that, or take hardware that breaks down after the warranty period as a sign from heaven to upgrade that particular piece!  :awesome_for_real:

Didn't people used to leave them running overnight with memory diagnostics and stuff going? Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, or something like it.

And actually I checked SiSoft Sandra for a burn / break in thingy, which it has.  Nifty stuff.

I broke mine in with Prime95 running on each core. Been pretty solid.

I just leave mine on all the time.  They break when you power them off.

Not really burn in but stability checking. 12-24h prime95/Orthos is good just to make sure there's no problems. Let's you know your baseline configuration is stable.

Then the overclocking can begin!

I prefer to leave a 3D graphics benchmark that can loop like 3DMark or the FF XI benchmark running overnight so both the CPU and GPU are stressed. If I'm really feeling paranoid I'll run Memtest overnight as well (on a different day, can't run at same time as graphics stuff).

No.  There is zero need to break in a computer.

You can test it to see if it has marginal parts, poor cooling, your placement constricts airflow.  Which is actually what you are referring to I believe.

Eh, wouldn't that be breaking it in?

I think of "breaking it in" as being when you put it through it's paces so the individual parts get a little wear and work better together - like you do with a car. All that's been talked about here is testing to make sure it actually works reliably.

Thats basically what a "burn in" is. If you have a marginally faulty computer part, there is a good chance it will break or show signs of failing in the first 24-48 hours of heavy use. Thats why people burn them in. New nVidia cards come with a burn in software also.

I used the nvidia and prime95 plus some other stuff on my latest build.

Oh yeah, you can usually tell if you fucked up your build by monitoring the fans and heat during the first hour or so of burn in also.

Doing a burn in these days isnt really necessary, but its nice to know that the system you built is stable and doesnt have any future flaws and/or weak points.

I would recommend it. I found some odd crap such as vista apparently does NOT like SATA optical drives or at least did not when I was putting my last computer together. That was not a hitch I was expecting and did not show up about how bad it really was until I started the burn in programs up to stress and test things.

Its mainly there to test if your current build is stable and the components are talking and performing as expected. If you do it right it hits stuff you may not actually access very often in normal operation so you may not find a fault that could potentially cause stability issues later down the road.

In my country, computer breaks in YOU!

That sounds highly erotic painful.