Prime95 is basically a Mersenne prime number discovery program. It's a great example of Distributed Computing, but it's most loved by overclockers for its powerful system stress-testing and benchmarking abilities. It can torture-test your CPU to produce its maximum heat or spit out any errors due to excessive overclocking. Also, using the blend test, it can consume all your physical memory and run error-checking tests on your modules to ensure their quality. However, right now, we're mostly interested in it for its benchmarking capabilities.

Here are the timings for the Intel Pentium 4 660 and 530, AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 and 3800+. (Less is better)

This test is known for highlighting the weak point in the AMD processors. However, the difference is significant.