There are multiple reasons you might want to overclock your CPU but overclocking can be difficult, and if it’s your first time doing it, navigating through BIOS settings and constant restarts and stress testing make this process a lengthy one. While CPU overclocking is best done through your PC’s BIOS, if you have an Intel chip you can do it through Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility, or XTU. Overclocking via XTU instead of the BIOS is better for those who are unfamiliar with overclocking and for people whose motherboards don’t support overclocking in the first place. Here are all the ins and outs of XTU.
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System requirements for XTU
XTU has some software and hardware requirements if you want to use the latest version, which is what this guide covers. These requirements are:
- Windows 10 version 20H1 or newer, or Windows 11 21H2 or newer.
- A 64-bit Windows installation.
- Windows Virtualization-Based Security (or VBS) is disabled.
- A non-server Intel CPU that’s 8th-generation (Coffee Lake) or newer.
While you can run XTU on any PC that fulfills those requirements, accessing the entirety of XTU’s overclocking capabilities will require a supported CPU. Any CPU ending in a K will have unlocked overclocking in XTU, as will many laptop chips. You can check the official list of supported CPUs on the XTU download page, or run XTU for yourself and see whether overclocking is enabled.
But whether you’re using an unlocked or locked CPU, you will need to disable VBS, which is a feature that is supposed to improve security but will prevent XTU from launching. If you try to launch XTU and VBS is enabled, XTU will tell you that you need to disable it. Thankfully, disabling VBS is simple: just search for Core Isolation on Windows, find the result of the same name with the System settings label, open it, and flick the switch that turns Memory integrity off.
An overview of XTU
When you open XTU, at first you’ll see the Compact View with a one-click overclocking option and a benchmark you can run. However, by clicking Advanced Viewyou can get full access to the rest of XTU and its eight distinct sections, some being very important and others being easily ignored. Here’s a quick summary of everything there is to do.
System Information
The System Information tab is exactly what it sounds like: It tells you info about your PC and in great detail. In the above screenshot, you can see key info about the CPU such as the name, architecture, core count, instructions, and more. You can see details about other components, such as the GPU and RAM, but there’s not as much info as you get with the CPU, which is to be expected.
Speed Optimizer
The Speed Optimizer tab contains the one-click overclocking solution that you are greeted with when you first open XTU. Much like you see in AMD’s Ryzen Master, Speed Optimizer will increase core clock speeds, power limits, and even the temperature-sensitive Thermal Velocity Boost part of Intel’s multi-layered boost technology. It won’t produce an overclock as well as if you did it manually, but it does save quite a bit of time and should do a half-decent job.
Advanced Tuning
The Advanced Tuning tab is the star of the show. It’s where you can intricately edit clock speeds for each core, adjust voltage, change power limits, and increase or decrease boosting time. We’ll go into more detail about what you can do with Advanced Tuning later since there’s so much to it.
VF Curve
The VF Curve tab is a strange one, and you might not even see it in XTU if you have a 13th-generation chip or one that has Undervolt Protection. VF Curve is supposed to plot what voltage is necessary for a given clock speed, but in practice, many users have reported that it doesn’t work very well, and this may be the reason why Intel no longer supports it. We’d recommend against using this feature, given how buggy it is and since it’s not super useful.
Stress Test
The Stress Test tab is pretty straightforward: It stress tests your CPU to ensure it’s stable. You have four tests to choose from: a regular CPU stress test, one that uses AVX instructions, one that uses AVX2 instructions, and one that tests memory. However, for CPU stability testing I’d recommend sticking with a benchmark like Cinebench or Prime95 on loop since those are known to be good for exposing instability problems in CPUs pretty quickly.
Benchmarking
The Benchmarking tab is also exactly what it sounds like, and includes Intel’s XTU Benchmark 2.0. What’s nice about this benchmark is that it can be uploaded to HWBOT and compared against other uploaded results, and you also get to see the maximum core clock and highest CPU temperature in your runs. However, like with the Stress Test, you’re probably better off using a more universal benchmark like Cinebench, since XTU Benchmark 2.0 only tests supported Intel CPUs and isn’t really a known quantity in the benchmarking world.
Profiles
The Profiles tab is where you can save and apply your individual overclocking profiles for your PC. In addition to being able to name them, Intel will also attach benchmarking data to each profile, and you can also upload profiles to HWBOT. I definitely recommend making profiles if you are going to use XTU since you don’t want to lose all your progress.
Profile Pairing
The last tab is Profile Pairingwhich just allows you to switch between profiles using hotkeys and/or based on what game you’re running. If you’ve ever used a laptop where you can switch between performance modes at the touch of a button, this is basically what XTU can do. You might also be interested in activating certain profiles depending on if you launch a certain application, though this is certainly more niche than just using a hotkey.
System diagnostics and monitoring
In addition to the eight tabs, there are also two sections at the bottom of XTU where you can see diagnostic info displayed on a graph and in text. You can customize the graph to show you certain pieces of data (by default it’s just package temperature, CPU usage, and max clock speed) but you can also add in stuff like voltage and power usage. As for the statistics on the right-hand side, you can add and remove pieces of info and also start logging these statistics by clicking File Logging.
A quick guide to the Advanced Tuning tab
As we said before, the Advanced Tuning tab is really detailed and where you probably want to go in XTU, but it can be quite overwhelming. There are several sections within Advanced Tuning, and if you’re a beginner at overclocking, I would recommend just sticking to the Core tab and ignoring everything else. We’re going to do a quick breakdown of all the settings you should pay attention to and gloss over the ones that you can safely ignore:
- Core Voltage Offset is a really important slider because adding more voltage is what you need to do to make an unstable overclock stable. Be careful though, since adding more voltage means more power consumption and heat, and can even do damage to your CPU if you add too much. Or, you could decrease this value to make your CPU more efficient, though if you end up decreasing it too much, you’ll make your CPU unstable and prone to crashing.
- Turbo Boost Short Power Max is a setting that allows your CPU to boost the frequency for a short period of time, hence the name. You should enable it and set it to Unlimited.
- Turbo Boost Power Max is a longer-term boost setting that you should also enable.
- Turbo Boost Power Time Window determines how long the Turbo Boost will last for, and you should either leave it at default or increase it to however high you can.
- Intel Overclocking Thermal Velocity Boost is yet another boost technology that you should enable.
And then we have the actual core overclocking part, and if you have a 12th- or 13th-generation CPU with P-cores and E-cores, you can edit the clock speeds of both. While there are many columns here, I would recommend focusing on just the Active Cores and Ratio columns, the first column referring to how many cores are being actively used and the second being the second half of the equation that determines your CPU’s clock speed. With a ratio of 50x and a reference clock of 100MHz, that’s 5GHz.
Essentially what you’re able to do here is apply an overclock to each individual core rather than the whole CPU at once. This is a really nice way to get as much performance as possible because when fewer cores are active, you can hit a higher clock speed since a CPU will have some cores that are faster than others, and also because getting a higher voltage for higher clock speeds is easier with fewer cores. For stability testing, I recommend using Cinebench since it has both a single-threaded and a multi-threaded benchmark.
In the experience of many (including myself), XTU has never been the perfect overclocking app, but it does a decent job. It’s fairly easy to use, it works on lots of old Intel CPUs, and you can do stuff that you usually can’t do in the BIOS, like setting a clock speed for each core. It’s a great way to get even more performance out of a good Intel CPU, provided it’s supported officially.
It’s also great for undervolting, which has been a good way to increase efficiency for Intel CPUs and have them run cooler, and that’s especially useful for laptops and mini PCs. Even the best laptops might not be able to cool a CPU super well, and XTU can give your Intel chip the edge it needs to perform well and offer good battery life.