Looking for feedback on using Burnin to isolate possible hardware issue

[wackypiney]

Hello Everyone, just looking for general feedback on any success or failures using the Burnin software to identify a hardware issue (bad cpu, motherboard, etc,.).

I am thinking about purchasing this software to determine the cause of an unexpected shutdown (OS cannot react fast enough to create a crash dump file) on a Server running Win2003 R2 x64 with Dual Opteron processors and an nVidia chipset.

Thanks in advance...

[David (PassMark)]

It won't tell you the failure cause. But it might help you reproduce the problem faster. By being able to provoke the problem, you can,

1) Quickly switch hardware in and out to try and localise the failure.

2) Place load on particular system components to see if this provokes a failure. (e.g. if just the 3D test in BurnInTest provokes the failure, then the video card, or it's device driver might be at fault).

But it is never easy to find faults like this.