Check out Intel’s official overclocking lab | usagoldmines.com

When you think of overclockers, you probably imagine some obsessive tech nerd coming up with an elaborate contraption to boost CPU or graphics card speed. And that’s absolutely true… but sometimes said obsessive tech nerd works for a company like Intel. We got a tour inside Intel’s Overclocking Lab, and an interview with Senior Principal Engineer Dan Ragland to explain.

“Today’s overclocking achievement becomes tomorrow’s base product capability,” says Ragland, explaining how his team can be involved in the planning stages for new chips and components as much as five years before they launch as standalone devices or installed in laptops and desktops. Pushing the limits of electronics can help determine where it’s safe and effective to stretch their abilities in ways that will be visible, if not exactly obvious, to the end user.

To do this, Dan’s team (which includes some of those obsessive nerds with overclocking world records) uses custom-tuned software. It’s tuned more towards validation than breaking records, though the Overclocking Lab definitely has some input on Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU), a Windows tool that lets you overclock, monitor, and stress-test Intel K and X-series processors.

Dan says that some of the most interesting work they do is in an unexpected place: overclocking integrated graphics (Arc and Xe, for Intel’s most recent laptop and desktop chips) to make them more powerful without any extra hardware. They can also go in the opposite direction, dynamically undervolting CPUs and GPUs when you don’t need the extra horsepower to save on thermal stress and battery life.

For more deep dives into how Intel makes its stuff, be sure to check out our impressions after a tour of Intel’s newest and most advanced chip fabrication plant. Subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube for more on the latest PC hardware, and check out our podcast The Full Nerd every week!