New
features in Version 21.4 of prime95.exe
1.
Exiting the Torture Test now prints out how long it ran.
2.
P4 error checking was relaxed slightly to reduce false alarms.
New
features in Version 21.3 of prime95.exe
1.
The program will now skip the P-1 factoring stage if another user
has already performed this step.
2.
The Advanced/Quit GIMPS menu choice now lets you quit after
current work completes or quit immediately.
3.
A bug was fixed in the error recovery code. After getting a "Disregard last
error" message, the user was treated to a new error on every
iteration. The end result was incorrect. The bug only affected the error recovery of
the new P4 FFT introduced in the beta version 21.2.
New
features in Version 21.2 of prime95.exe
1.
The program now uses the SSE2 instructions introduced on the
Pentium 4 CPU. This version is about 3
times faster than the previous version on a P4.
2.
The program now uses the prefetch instructions on the Celeron 2,
Pentium 3, and all Athlon CPUs. This
results in about a 20% performance boost on these machines.
3.
Process priority is now set to idle. Microsoft documentation says that an idle thread priority
overrides process priority. The
program's priority scheme has always worked well. However, several Win2K users have reported that the program works
better if the process priority is also set to idle.
4.
The program now delays calculations until 90 seconds after
bootup. This lets your machine boot up
as fast as possible. This can be
changed, see undoc.txt.
5.
The default crossover between double-check assignments and
first-time tests has been increased to a 400 MHz PII.
6.
After 5 1/2 years, a help file now exists! It is HTML Help which may have problems on
older Windows machines. If so, try
downloading hhupd.exe from Microsoft's web site.
7.
The program used to do factoring and P-1 testing on new exponents
before completing LL tests on older exponents.
This was confusing to many. The
program now processes the worktodo.ini file in sequential order. See undoc.txt on how to restore the old
behavior.
8.
Error messages such as ILLEGAL SUMOUT, SUMINP != SUMOUT, etc. are
no longer sent to the server since the final result contains a count of how
many errors occurred during the LL test.
9.
Some of the FFT crossover points have changed slightly.
10.
Test/Status now outputs the day of the week each work item will
complete.
11.
Interim output lines have changed - hopefully, so they are more
useful especially to newbies. By
default, output lines no longer contain the clocks count. Lines now contain a timestamp. Benchmark timings are now output in
milliseconds. These defaults can be
changed using options in undoc.txt.
12.
A new welcome screen for new users will encourage stress testers
to use the program without reserving exponents.
13.
There is now a menu choice that lets you unreserve a specific
exponent. This is for knowledgeable
users only. You might do this if the
server assigned a small exponent and you'd rather be testing larger ones. Or the prime95 you set up on another machine
had a hard drive failure.
14.
The Windows 9x Service menu choice has been replaced by the more
general Start at Bootup menu choice.
This choice now sets registry entries to auto start prime95 on any
Windows machine. WARNING: Using this option will delete any StartUp
menu shortcuts so the registry entry and startup menu do not both try to start
prime95.
15.
Prime95 will now ask for confirmation if you enter a CPU speed
that differs from the computed CPU speed by more than 4%.
16.
The self-test menu choice was deleted - use the torture test
instead.
17.
A benchmark menu choice has been added.
18.
The torture test code now includes more FFT lengths including
smaller ones that run completely in the L2 cache, which may increase CPU
temperatures. Each FFT size is tested
for 15 minutes by default.
19.
There are now several options in the undoc.txt for fine-tuning the
torture test's behavior.