I see no value to synthetics except as follows:
a) I use prime 95 to cure the TIM with a couple of quick runs to bring up the CPU temp to 85C for a few seconds with minumal fan speeds and take it right down. Once cooled to stable temp, "rinse and repeat", As long as ya not using a paste that takes 200 hours to cure (i.e. AS5), you'll be done in a hour.
b) I use Furmark to adjust my radiator fan and pump speeds. On current box, the GPus were at 39C at 1200 rpm, and 44C at a point where a fans were inaudible.... 44C it is.
We stopped using synthetics when AVX and subsequent new instruction sets came into play. When overlcocking, most uses have the temperature and voltage limits that they want to use and AVX thru that all outat whack as voltages would pop up 0.13v and tempsas much as 10C when AVX was present. Synthetics present a load that after you dial in ya OC, the system will never see again. So what's the point.
1. Because it's an extreme load, its kinda like testing your SUV that you intend to pull your 400 pound boat / trailer to the beach 15 miles away buy towing a low-boy flatbed with a bulldozer up the Rocky Mountains. Not rally representative in most cases what that PC will be doing from Day 2 thru 1500
2. With regard to those temperature limits, synthetics will push voltage and temps higher than anything else you will ever do. So if your OC is P95 stable at 4.6 GHz and a constant 1.40 volts and highest core temps at 80C, when you run whatever you are going to run, that OC might only be 1.35 w/ 71 mac core temp under every day usage. In other words... lookes like ya might be able to hit 4.7 or 4.8 with more reasonable loads.
3. Finally, when first looking at alternatives to synthetics, we found that a 24 hour stable P95 OC would sometimes fail under RoG Real Bench multitasking test in < 2 hours.
So the approach these days is ....all rad and case fans on max speed
A. Cure the TIM, as above so you don't have temps changing throughout testing runs.
B. Run everything at stock settings, lower voltages incrementally till pass RoG RB for 2 hours and use this as baseline.
C. From here, take two approaches depending on time available....a) bump CPU multiplier by +1 over turbo and incrementally by 1 from there to get stable OC w/lowest voltages / temps possible. Turn on XMP and rerun... or b) do some reach and look for the average / medium CPU Multiplier OC and skip all the ones in between; work up or down by +1 depending on results. Save results for each CPU multiplier for each Multiplier
D. Once at that point, I'll do a 4 hour run of RoG RB as the CPU stability test. Then I'll move up cache multiplier to CPU Multiplier -3 . If just a gaming box, can leave at default but w/ graphics apps, there can be a drop off if more than 3 below ... going higher has not shown any benefit in my limited testing.
E. At that point, before bed time, memtest+ overnight (12 hours)
F. Finally GPU testing..... Find max stable core OC with Furmark (memory at stock); then find max stable memory OC with Furmark.
G. At that point, it's about finding the best combo between fastest memory and fastest core and the determination is not by those numbers. The you can get higher fps with lower core or memory speeds ... so i stop looking at those and average the GFX benchmark results using the "usual suspects" benchmarks.
4. Once done, I have never had an application or game that warranted any CPU or memory adjustments. On the GPU side, I have found it necessary to keep at least 3 profiles.
1. What I got from above testing.... possible adjusted downwards if get problems in a significant number of games.
2. A lowered setting because I was experiencing crashes at some point in a game. In Metro 2033 I wold experience this when coming up from underground and looking out over the junkyard ... would have to close game, drop to this setting, climb out from underground , then save and go back to high setting.
3. A still lowered setting for anything that yhad the word "Battlefield" in it
