I tested Intel’s new overclocking tool, and it does AI all w…

One of the most interesting features of Intel’s recent Core i9-14900K is its AI-assisted overclocking. Available through the Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU), AI Assist is presented as the natural next step in automated overclocking. It uses AI to advance the chips rather than relying on the predetermined list of checks that Intel already offers through XTU.

At least that’s the pitch. But according to my own testing, AI Assist doesn’t do much.

Not only does this offer minimal benefits due to being limited to a Core i9-14900K, but it also shows the dangers of randomly adding AI in places where it doesn’t belong. It’s a shame, too, because we’ve seen some clear examples of how AI can boost performance on PCs. AI Assist doesn’t fit into that framework.

there is little to matter

Don’t expect AI Assist to provide a big performance boost. It takes about 45 seconds to run the feature on your PC, and Intel says XTU tests applications during that window to determine optimal overclocking settings. Admittedly, AI Assist goes further than offering automatic overclocking in XTU, but it actually delivers similar results.

The result: a massive 100 MHz increase across all cores. I ran the overclock through Cinebench R23, which yielded a 1.5% improvement in multi-core performance and a 1.6% improvement in single-core performance. When testing a real application, there is no difference. In our Handbrake transcoding benchmark, the AI ​​Assist overclock produced similar results to the stock Core i9-14900K.

I never expected big performance gains from the automatic overclocking feature, but disappointingly, automatic overclocking in the XTU produced exactly the same overclock settings with similar performance. It’s unclear what the AI ​​is doing here, but at least from my testing, it’s no better than the otherwise limited automatic overclocking already present in XTU.

The app is the problem here, and this is true on two fronts. The first is the Core i9-14900K. This is already a chip that’s been pushed to its absolute limits, as it’s essentially a juiced-up version of the last-generation Core i9-13900K. It doesn’t provide any big performance lift, as you can read in our Core i9-14900K and Core i9-13900K comparison, so expecting overclocking to do much – AI or otherwise – isn’t a good idea.

This is also the application of AI for overclocking. You can imagine how AI could be useful for automated overclocking – train a model on thousands of different PC configurations and their components and use those patterns to figure out the optimal settings – but it doesn’t seem like that. Intel is doing a lot with AI Assist. I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but whatever it is, it doesn’t look very sophisticated. And based on the end result, that’s still true.

wrong application

We’ve seen plenty of examples of AI where it shouldn’t be implemented this year, but the disappointing thing about AI Assist is that it can Work. It doesn’t do much right now with the Core i9-14900K and Intel’s seemingly basic AI implementation.

AI can dramatically improve the power of a PC, and we have a great example of AI doing this: Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). It started out as just an AI-assisted upscaling tool, but has evolved to apply AI to frame generation and ray tracing denoisers, with all three working to improve performance and the gaming experience on PC. Are.

DLSS and AI Assist are not the same thing, but DLSS is a prime example of applying AI to a problem and seeing tangible benefits from it. There is no AI assist. It’s applying AI to a situation where performance gains are already limited, and doing so in a way that does nothing to improve performance or user experience.

Like the rest of the computing world, Intel is also emphasizing on AI. Its next-generation Meteor Lake chips come with a dedicated AI processor, despite the fact that the only obvious application for it is Windows Studio Effects. We now have AI-assisted overclocking, despite the fact that the days of small overclocks producing big performance leaps are now far behind us. And next month, Intel is launching its next-generation CPUs for laptops with a program called “AI Everywhere.” I am not against AI being everywhere, but it needs to be understood.

Unfortunately the XTU doesn’t have AI assist. it can This is a great feature, especially for lower-end chips that have some extra headroom. And it can bring AI to a place where it matters, given that the model behind the scenes is actually providing something you can’t get from a one-click overclocking tool. It’s possible we may see this in the future with AI assists, but it’s not here yet.