Intel xtu: what it is and what it is for

Trying to lower the temperature, improve performance, or increase a laptop's battery life - it's all about making small adjustments that can add something more noticeable. Intel XTU (Extreme Tuning Utility) is a powerful piece of software for overclocking or underclocking, with options to adjust voltage and TDP to reduce temperatures, extend battery life, and improve performance.

What is Intel XTU

Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) is a Windows based program that Intel promotes as a way to speed up and fine-tune the performance of your system. Many enthusiasts prefer to handle this via BIOS, but Intel XTU offers options for modifying metrics like core voltage, clock speed multiplier, and turbo boost power limits.

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However, most of us own laptops that are not capable of overclocking, both because of the change that Intel processors underwent from a traditional FSB to BCLK configuration several years ago, and because the cooling systems are not capable to handle that thermal. Fortunately, some of the settings available to us, such as core voltage, which is not only used for overclocking, and which can also be used to reduce thermal load.

Intel XTU is a tool that allows us to adjust settings that can lower the temperatures our system reaches under load, possibly making fans run more quietly and even prolong battery life.

What Intel XTU offers us

When you open Intel XTU for the first time, a screen appears with detailed information about your hardware, such as the processor, memory, motherboard, etc. This data can be useful for people trying to help with troubleshooting through a forum, but remember to hide any serial number.

On the left side is the navigation menu, where you will scroll through the various functions necessary for overclocking or underclocking. At the bottom, you'll see a line graph and a table that shows the output data of the hardware and associated sensors within your PC. The default settings show data such as temperature, utilization, and throttle status, but the small wrench / wrench icons allow you to add or remove items from the to adjust settings and show what's important.

When overclocking on desktop systems, it's common to set a static voltage to improve stability, but on mobile devices this can reduce battery life. Instead, we'll just offset, which allows the processor to dynamically change the voltage to match the task - that is, lower when idle and higher when working hard. This offset works by taking the level that the CPU would have adjusted to and then increasing or decreasing it based on the level of the offset.

The built-in stress tests aren't particularly stressful compared to fan favorites like Prime95 or AIDA64, but they are adequate for our initial tests. You can set a custom length for the stress test, and each test tries to create a full load without creating the saturation of the workload caused by the two stress tests mentioned above. Built-in tests are useful for evaluating stability during the turning process, while Prime95 or AIDA64 can be used to validate stability once you have finished adjusting your "long-term" settings.

It is worth running the benchmark before adjusting any settings, as it can be used as a benchmark to evaluate any gains we make. However, we should note that, like stress tests, this benchmark is not very comprehensive compared to a third-party alternative such as a Cinebench R15 loop, to assess performance over time to see temperature improvements and energy consumption derived from the inflection. In fairness to Intel, this utility is their recommended software method of overclocking K-series processors, so this benchmark is designed to measure performance gain by increasing clock speed. The Intel XTU Benchmark window shows the last run score, maximum frequency and temperature, and a graph showing that we were activating the power limit limitation.

Intel XTU allows you to create multiple profiles of various settings that you can change quickly. For most readers, this feature won't be used much, because once you've found the best stable sub-tab your system can handle, it will work like this indefinitely. However, if you have a CPU capable of overclocking, then you can create an overclocked profile for tasks such as gaming or video editing, and an overclocked profile that runs during regular computing to improve battery life and thermals.

This ends our article on Intel XTU: what it is and what it is for, we hope it has been very useful for you.