how does prime95 work

[Solely Beats]

I'm new at this. My teacher at school was talking about prime numbers. He was talking about the Great Mersenne Prime Search. He told us if you had a good computer, try finding primes using it. I have a decent PC with a Ryzen 5 2600 at 4.0ghz.

 

Here's my current progress so far, how do you know if you've found a prime number. Also what does the ETA thing stand for.

 

I've been running prime95 for almost the past day now.

[anoor9000]

I don't know much about the other uses for Prime95, but people use it for stress testing their CPU to check for stability when overclocking. It hits your CPU incredibly hard and causes it to run hot. 

 

I would suggest not running it for extended periods of time simply because it will lessen the longevity of your hardware.

[Solely Beats]

2 minutes ago, anoor9000 said:

I don't know much about the other uses for Prime95, but people use it for stress testing their CPU to check for stability when overclocking. It hits your CPU incredibly hard and causes it to run hot. 

 

I would suggest not running it for extended periods of time simply because it will lessen the longevity of your hardware.

that is true haha, at least I know my 4ghz overclock is stable. I guess I'll run prime95 on my old 4690k computer.

[Pickles von Brine]

Prime95 is a scientific application used for calculating prime numbers. Seems simple, but it really isn't. From what I gather, Prime95 loads up the processor with very complicated renditions of prime, then requests the CPU to calculate it. It also already knows the answer, so if the number is off, there is an issue. 


Some of these prime numbers could possibly be in the millions of digits. Quite something. 

In fact this same application you are using for stress testing, was used to find the current known largest mersenne prime number.