INTEL’S EXTREME TUNING UTILITY

You can actually do a fair amount of this from the desktop, using Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU). It’s a neat piece of freeware developed by Intel, which enables you to adjust a variety of settings from the desktop. You can adjust the multiplier, base clock, and voltages, and apply these settings direct from the desktop. You still face similar instability issues once you push the multiplier higher, but it does save time, as you don’t need to restart your rig every time you apply new settings.

The only major downsides are to do with how you apply the core voltage. By default, Intel’s XTU sets it to “Adaptive” (think “Auto”)—to change this, you have to adjust the “Core Voltage” figure to the right (we recommend 1.0V for any Skylake-X chip), then change the “Core Voltage Mode” from “Adaptive” to “Static,” and adjust the “Core Voltage Offset” by the increments we mention in the main tutorial.

It even detects whether you’ve made any changes in BIOS and applies them directly to the same settings on desktop, and includes its own stress tests and integrated benchmarks, along with a plethora of monitoring tools.