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XTU bug when setting voltages or editing VF-Curve

Teasi
New Contributor I
7,944 Views

I have encountered 3 very serious issues stopping me from using XTU.

I just got my new i5-12600k and wanted to try overclocking, this is what has happened:

 

1)

When I change either the "Voltage Override" or the "Voltage Offset" for any of my cores under the Per-Core Tuning section, it will at first seem to accept my value, which might be something like offset: "0,100V" for example. But then, shortly after inputting the value, the input field will go blank, and the handle on the slider will disappear. By hovering over the circular info symbol "i" it will show that the new proposed voltage is something insanely large.

The exact value seems to be proportional to the input value multiplied by 1 thousand. Choosing a negative offset like "-0,005 V" for any of the cores will set the voltage exactly to "-5,000 V" and choosing an offset like "0,100 V" will set the voltage to "100,000 V." (Using comma for decimal indicator same as XTU software does.)

I can't overclock anything like this, I don't know what values of voltage it would really try to run through my cpu.

 

2)

Furthermore, when using the VF Curve. If I grab one of the control points to try and move it in the graph, it will shoot off in either vertical direction from the tiniest of mouse movement. I might try to drag it a millimeter, but it will shoot up to 998V, or down to 0.002V. Exact numbers seem random, but this bug also seems related to the one mentioned above. (This also ended up freezing and crashing the program.)

 

3)

And lastly, perhaps unrelated to the first two points, when pressing the "Scan Default VF Curve" button beneath the VF Curve, it will most of the time warn about "invalid voltage points" due to "thermal throttling." The XTU monitoring panel also shows that the cpu is thermal throttling while running the scan. Problem is, I have no clue why it would thermal throttle when the maximum temperature it reaches is 56°C and other XTU benchmarks don't make it throttle or get any notably hotter. I have a good cooling setup using a noctua nh-d15.

 

Thanks for reading, I hope these issues can be addressed or resolved somehow.

 

Edit: This was on Windows 11 Home 21H2

TLDR: Voltage input values get multiplied by 1000 for whatever reason (which also causes crashes in the VF-Curve). Unable to use XTU safely.

1 Solution
Teasi
New Contributor I
4,670 Views

Hello,

 

Just thought I'd add that this issue has been solved as of the latest version of XTU (7.9.1.3)

 

Regards,

Teasi

View solution in original post

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32 Replies
DeividA_Intel
Moderator
6,159 Views

Hello Teasi,  

  


Thank you for posting on the Intel® communities. I understand you are having issues with your Intel® Core™ i5-12600K Processor.

  

Please bear in mind that Intel does not advise to overclock the processor since this can damage the unit and may void the warranty. However, in order to help you, please provide the following:  


1. Run the Intel® System Support Utility (Intel® SSU) to gather more details about the system.  

2. Provide the Report for Intel® Processor Diagnostic Tool:

3. Is this issue recent? If so when did start?

4. Did the Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU) work with another CPU? If so, which processor?

5. Have you experienced other issues with your processor besides the Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU)?



Regards,  

Deivid A.  

Intel Customer Support Technician  


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Teasi
New Contributor I
6,145 Views

Hi Deivid!

 

Thank you for your response, the help is very appreciated! I don't intend to overclock heavily or make any big changes to the settings, but I thought I should have a look at what tools were available for my processor.

 

1. 2. Should I attach the results from the SSU and Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool scans below?

 

3. The processor was installed less than a week ago, and the issue has been happening since the first time I opened XTU, which was during the night when I started this thread. To me, from what I could see, it seemed like a ui bug in XTU.

 

4. I have not used XTU with another processor in this system, or with any other system in fact. This is a brand new system and it is my first time using XTU.

 

5. I have not experienced any other issues with my processor than what was described above, the processor appears to be working normally. Although, after running the Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool, it seems something about my CPU or the scan has failed right at the beginning (BrandString).

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Teasi
New Contributor I
6,134 Views

I read here https://community.intel.com/t5/Processors/brand-string-fail-test/m-p/560046#M29390 that when the BrandString test in Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool fails, it does not necessarily mean that the processor is defective, and that I should change the setting called "Stop Testing on Fail" from "On" to "Off," and so I did that and ran the test again. The tests continued past the BrandString test, but the last one, "CPUFreq" failed. Is this thread the correct place to attach the scan results?

 

Thanks again!

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AlHill
Super User
6,133 Views

The 12th gen processors are not yet supported by IPDT.  At least, that is my understanding.

 

Doc (not an Intel employee or contractor)
[Waiting for Windows 12]

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Teasi
New Contributor I
6,115 Views

Interesting, I was also thinking about if I'd gotten the correct version of IPDT or not when I installed it. On the download page it does not specifically say that windows 11 is supported, only "Windows 10*" and some others. (I can't seem to find where the star leads to and I don't know what it means otherwise.)

 

Oh, and now looking at the list below the download links it says: "This download is valid for the product(s) listed below." And, the i5-12600k is indeed not shown on that list.

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DeividA_Intel
Moderator
5,981 Views

Hello Teasi, 


I do appreciate your feedback. In this case, you can attach the report from the Intel® System Support Utility (Intel® SSU) in your next response.



Also, I would like to confirm the following:


1. Have you tried uninstalling the Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU) and reinstalling it?

2. Do you have any other overclocking tools installed?



Best regards, 

Deivid A.  

Intel Customer Support Technician 


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Teasi
New Contributor I
5,938 Views

Hello Deivid,

 

Sure! I have attached the results of the SSU scan below.

 

1. I had not tried that previously, but I gave it a try right now and the issue still persists after having uninstalled and reinstalled Intel XTU.

 

2. I have no other CPU overclocking tools installed. The only three oc-related things I have would be a) the Gigabyte System Information Viewer (SIV), which I use to control all of my fans. It also displays some basic information about your system, but doesn't let you edit any of it. And b) an xmp profile for my ram is enabled in bios. And c) msi Afterburner for my GPU. Those are all of the oc-related things present on my system. I have not touched any of the cpu's settings in bios.

 

I also attached two videos demonstrating the behaviour exactly. Also, do note the unexpected thermal throttling in the VF-Curve video, as can be seen in the bottom right panel. At the end of that same video the program froze and Windows asked me to force close it, which I had to do because it did not seem to recover on its own even after waiting some time.

 

Regards,

Teasi

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Jane_Doe
Beginner
5,911 Views

Hello @Teasi,.If you got any solution please let me know as well, I have something similar kind of problem, Thanks.       

DeividA_Intel
Moderator
5,892 Views

Hello Teasi, 



Thanks for all the information provided. In this I would like you to try the following:



1. In this case, try to follow the steps from this article to uninstall and reinstall the Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU) as a test:

2. Load BIOS settings to default.

3. Check Windows updates for optional updates.

4. Turn off any Overclocking option/configuration in BIOS,e.g.: EZ OC and Intel® XMP.



Best regards, 

Deivid A.  

Intel Customer Support Technician 


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DeividA_Intel
Moderator
5,857 Views

Hello Teasi,  


 

I reviewed your post, please let me know if the issue was resolved, if not, do not hesitate, just reply back.


  

Regards,  

Deivid A.  

Intel Customer Support Technician 


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Teasi
New Contributor I
5,794 Views

Hello Deivid,

 

Apologies for the delay, I needed to focus on other projects for a while. 

 

I have followed the steps you listed. When uninstalling XTU as per 1) there was no "Intel Telemetry" folder but otherwise it went smoothly. I then checked 3) for windows updates and there was only a small windows security update to install, which I then did. Unfortunately completing the rest of the steps did not fix my problem with XTU, the weird behaviour still happens.

 

I'm going to document/write out everything that has happened after I completed steps 1) and 3), some problems and a solution I had with bios, as well as add some extra background because I really don't know what's related to what issue anymore.

First of some background, my motherboard is apparently known for having issues with running xmp profiles, something which I did have issues with when I first installed everything. Despite my ram being listed as compatible with my motherboard, the system would not boot whenever the xmp profile was enabled in bios, and the motherboard would light up a red led indicating an error specifically with the RAM. I fixed this issue by doing the following: updating bios (latest version F7), moving my two ram sticks to the A2/B2 slots which according to the manual have better xmp compatibility, and then finally I manually set the dram voltage to 1.35v instead of leaving it on auto (such that it is not controlled by the xmp setting). I double checked that 1.35v was the intended voltage for my ram's xmp. The system would not boot if any one of these changes were not made. I've found a couple other threads where other's have had these exact ram issues and solutions with my motherboard.

After getting the xmp running, everything worked without issue. Fast forward a few days and I run into my problems with XTU. Otherwise the system seemed normal, except the OS (windows 11) acting weird at times. (I had a problem or bug where windows defender essentially disabled/deleted itself and it had to be fixed via a powershell command to reset it, supposedly a common bug in the windows beta.) 

My ram was bought as an "opened package." And, today I decided I would run a memtest to ensure that the ram really was fine with running xmp. It passed a whole day of testing without any errors, and so I believe it is indeed fine.

I then came back to this thread to follow the steps you had listed.

Steps 1) and 3) went well as described above. Step 2) I very surprisingly had a lot of issues with. I could not enter bios. I tried entering bios via gigabytes AppCenter panel, where there's an "enter bios" button inside of the "FastBoot" app. (The only apps I have are "bios", fastboot, and siv, none of which are for overclocking.) The "enter bios" button inside of FastBoot usually restarts your system into bios. However, now it booted me into a blackscreen (it had worked before). I then tried disabling the fastboot feature, but the button still only restarted into a blackscreen. I noticed that when I manually restarted and tried entering bios by pressing DEL during startup there was no gigabyte-splashscreen, and pressing/spamming del only got me stuck in a blackscreen. However, if I booted without pressing del, it would launch me into windows as usual. I was able to fix this issue by unplugging my monitor from my gpu and plugging it into the motherboard directly, and removing the hdmi to my vr headset from the gpu at the same time. I could then boot into bios without any issues. I then plugged my monitor and vr headset back into my gpu and everything worked fine again. It seemed like my motherboard got confused which output was my monitor?

Either way after that was cleared up, I loaded the defaults in bios, completed steps 2) and 4) while double checking that things like xmp and EZ OC was turned off.

Finally, I reinstalled XTU, and the problem still happens.

 

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I hope the information might be useful to someone and I believe it's good to document in some form at least.

 

Best Regards,

Teasi

 

 

 

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DeividA_Intel
Moderator
5,722 Views

Hello Teasi, 


  

Thank you for the information provided 


  

I will proceed to check the issue internally and post back soon with more details. 


  

Best regards, 

Deivid A.  

Intel Customer Support Technician 


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DeividA_Intel
Moderator
5,635 Views

Hello Teasi, 



We have released a new Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU) version (7.7.0.12), please try this version and let me know if the issue persists.


Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU):



Regards,  

Deivid A.  

Intel Customer Support Technician  


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Teasi
New Contributor I
5,562 Views

Hello Deivid, 

 

Thanks for looking into the issue.

 

I fully uninstalled my old version of XTU and installed the newer one (7.7.0.12) and tried again. Unfortunately the issue persists completely without any change, and so the update did not solve my problem.

 

Regards,

Teasi

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DeividA_Intel
Moderator
5,507 Views

Hello Teasi, 



I am sorry to know that the new Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU) version did not solve your issue.


I will continue with the research and as soon as I have any information I will let you know.



Regards,  

Deivid A.  

Intel Customer Support Technician  


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DeividA_Intel
Moderator
5,187 Views

Hello Teasi, 



I would like to let you know that we were not able to replicate the issue. We tried with an I9-12900K, Win11, ROG Strix z690-A Gaming Wifi D4 motherboard and did not get the same issue.


However, in order to confirm the results, provide us with exact steps to reproduce just to make sure we are not missing anything.


For now, remove any other 3rd party software that may be impacting performance, antivirus, etc, load BIOS defaults, and test again.




Regards,  

Deivid A. 

Intel Customer Support Technician 



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DeividA_Intel
Moderator
5,166 Views

Hello Teasi,  


 

I reviewed your post, please let me know if the issue was resolved, if not, do not hesitate, just reply back.


  

Regards,  

Deivid A.  

Intel Customer Support Technician  



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Teasi
New Contributor I
5,149 Views

Hello Deivid,

 

The issue has not been resolved and no further developments or changes have been made. 

 

There are no 3rd party software left to remove, and I don't know of any way to fully disable Windows Defender Antivirus if that's what you mean (it is the only antivirus program which has been installed at the time of testing, given that it's included in windows). The results remain the same.

 

I'm sorry to hear you've not had much luck with replicating the issue. Unfortunately the steps to reproduce it are nothing special either really.  I will try detailing everything and all factors which I can think of that may have had an impact either way.

 

  • I assembled all of the new hardware, as well as my old SSD which had an installation of win10 on it, to build my new pc.
  • I booted into the old SSD's installation of win10, ran the Microsoft Windows Health Check tool in order to setup a win11 installation USB.
  • Using that USB I made a clean installation of windows11 on one of my newly bought SSD's (the Samsung 970 NVME) which was to become my main boot (C:) drive. (The old SSD which had an installation of win10 has since been cleared, and XTU should in no way have ever interacted with it since XTU was never installed on that drive.)
  • During the installation of windows11 onto the NVME SSD I chose for the system's language to be "English UK" and I set the input language to be "Swedish" (because I use a keyboard with a nordic layout).
  • I disabled all tracking and advertising options (cortana, gps, personalized ads, etc.) that I could during setup. Only using the provided menus and options.
  • When finished installing win11, it appeared that Windows had been de-activated because of a detected system change. I signed in with my Microsoft Account and after that I was able to re-activate Windows using the license tied to my account.
  • I then updated any drivers using Gigabyte's APP Center. I chose to install all the newest drivers I could (intel and gigabyte drivers mostly) and three gigabyte apps: SIV (fan control and simple system monitoring), FastBoot (allows setting fastboot options in Windows), and lastly BIOS (which lets you update BIOS from within Windows). I avoided the bloatware Norton antivirus fully.
  • I then setup and enabled my xmp profiles on my ram. (We now know that disabling this does not fix the issues with XTU.)
  • Finally, I installed intel XTU. I did not change any settings during the installation.
  • Restarted my pc.
  • Ran XTU.
  • Switched tabs to Advanced Tuning and VF-Curve.
  • Tried changing the values exactly as shown in the videos I sent above and that's when the issues started happening, exactly as they do in the video.
  • After that I started this thread.

I assume my exact version of windows and drivers are in the SSU_Results.txt file I sent above.

Something I thought sounded unlikely to be the cause, but has come to my mind now and then, is about how an error like this could realistically occur. It's an "off by 1000-type error". I've found it odd how XTU uses the comma symbol to denote decimal places given that in English the standard is to use a point for the decimal place. So, like, maybe at some point it's trying to multiply the voltage value by 1 or "1.000" (point for decimal) but somehow it turns into multiplying it by 1,000 (no decimal) and thereby it becomes an "off by 1000 error"? That seems really really weird and unlikely to me, I can't imagine any code that would work like that. Still something along those lines has been on my mind partly because of the language settings on pc, which are English(UK) with a Swedish keyboard layout, and typically windows sometimes enforces Swedish language standards in places it shouldn't because it detects my country. In Sweden we use the comma to denote the decimal place meanwhile the comma-decimal is not the standard in the English language afaik. So maybe windows11 is somehow getting involved and messing something up when converting strings and ints/fixed-points? The other reason this was on my mind is that I've noticed how some common elements between 3rd party software have changed their design due to being run on win11, for example, all standard drop down menu's within 3rd party apps now look slightly different and more in line with the win11 design language solely due to being run on this OS (without themselves having been updated or edited in any way).

 

That's really everything I know. Somehow the voltage values are all off by a factor of 1000. Maybe it's just the displayed values that are wrong and the drop down menus in XTU then break as a result of that since they're not meant to display voltages that big. Nonetheless, I am not confident on whether or not it's simply a weird display issue, or if the values that would be sent to the CPU are actually off by a factor of 1000. Nonetheless, I am not risking electrocuting my CPU by applying any changes from XTU. The issue certainly causes the program to crash while using the graph editor too, so all in all, the bug essentially bricks the XTU software for me and anyone else with this issue. Although I can add that the automatic OC feature in XTU does seem to work perfectly fine without any issue when I tried it recently. But I decided against using that either way, and am currently running my CPU on factory settings.

 

Lastly, I know this is probably not the right forum to post this Intel bug report to, but I don't currently have the time to track down the correct place and to go through the work of reporting it so I'm writing it somewhere it might get noticed at least.

On the intel website (this website). If you clear all your cookies and then refresh this site you will be asked for permission to store cookies etc. If you choose the "Deny All" option, that will then brick your ability to login to the website. Attempting to login will give an error saying "to try again or to contact support". To solve it I had to clear my cookies again (so it would ask for my permissions a 2nd time) and then I specifically enabled "Functional Cookies" and after that I was able to login as normal. I don't know if it is wise for the "Deny All" option which explicitly excludes the category "Necessary Cookies" to brick the user's ability to sign in. The sign in functionality should clearly be included in the "Necessary cookies" category (although I'm not sure if cookies should be a requirement for login in the first place).

 

Best regards,

Teasi

DeividA_Intel
Moderator
5,110 Views

Hello Teasi, 



I really appreciate all this information. I will check this behavior internally to confirm if have we any additional steps to perform or if we discover any problem with the tool.


I will inform you about any updates regarding this issue.



Best regards, 

Deivid A.  

Intel Customer Support Technician



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