[Cube] PLAY CHESS! OWC comment re testing processor upgrades

[Steve Goldstein]

BACKGROUND: I had reported that my OWC Mercury Extreme 1.4 GHz processor upgrade was the culprit that was causing my Quicksilver 2002 to go crazy on me (weird font substitutions, freezing), and all this learned after hunting down, testing, and rejecting just about all other possibilities first.  OWC was VERY cooperative in accepting the processor upgrade for replacement.  The replacement processor has worked well for several days already.

CHESS: I wrote to ask OWC Tech Support about testing the new processor, because, even though it seems to be working properly, Apple Hardware Test (CD that comes with new Macs) reported the same errors as with the defective processor.  Their reply was very interesting and worth sharing--PLAY CHESS:

At 12:27 PM -0500 6/30/05, hdtech at helpdesk.owc.net wrote:
>The hardware test is not the most reliable with third party processors.  It may be reporting errors though there are none.
>
>The best way to test your processor is to use the application Chess, which Apple includes with OS X.  If you launch the program Chess, you can set the preferences to have the computer play itself.  This provides a unique set of conditions on the computer.  Because Chess is so math intensive, it will push the CPU to its maximum usage for a majority of the time it is playing the game.  It is not very ram intensive, video intensive, and does not access the hard drive.  This limits the pressure to just the processor.  We have found over the past few years, that this will cause most bad processors to fail.  For our tests, we will have the computer play 5 to 7 games of chess in a row.  With a good processor installed, Chess may fail once in that group of games.  Usually Chess completes each game without incident.  If Chess fails 2 or more times in that group of 5 to 7 games, then that is very strong evidence that the processor may be defective.  Of course this is not a 100% test, !
> but for OWC's purposes, if a processor fails the Chess test, we will replace the processor.  If you find that the processor passes the Chess test, but still has stability problems with other applications, that will suggest that the cause of the stability problems is not a defective processor.

So far, the replacement processor passed the CHESS test without any failures.

--Steve