With a new 8th gen i7 laptop on hand, undervolting the CPU got brought up to increase the CPU turbo/performance, battery life, and fan curve. There seems to be 3 ways of doing this, Intel XTU, ThrottleStop, and natively in BIOS.
I’ll leave you figure out how the software and solutions work in your own pace – link.
The issue at hand however is that the newer, as of writing, version 6.4.1.25 of Intel XTU is not supporting my laptop anymore, throwing error ‘0x80070643‘, ‘attempted to install on an unsupported platform‘ during the setup.
Workaround
Run the .exe and extract the .msi installer from your %temp% folder.
Run the .msi while passing the DISABLEPLATFORMCHECK=1 property.
cd C:\Users\Username\Downloads
## Run .exe installer
XTUSetup.exe
## Proceed until error message on screen - Don't exit
# Copy the .msi version of the installer package from %Programdata%\Package Cache\ location
copy C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{275588D7-6C9D-4FB0-BBAE-2FA3F7C2DADB}v6.4.1.25\XTUInstaller.msi C:\Users\Username\Downloads\XTUInstaller.msi
## Exit the .exe installer
# Run the .msi version of the installer setting the DISABLEPLATFORMCHECK property to '1'
msiexec /i XTUInstaller.msi DISABLEPLATFORMCHECK=1
Due to the nature of this workaround, use at your own risk, and all that!
Show your work
Starting on the task of undervolting the CPU in my Huawei Matebook X Pro quickly got me to Intel XTU and ThrottleStop via the likes of /r/MatebookXPro. I decided to go for XTU mainly due to the fact that I’ve previously had contact with the software.
With the success stories over on /r/MatebookXPro and other places on the internet I knew that XTU was Supposed to work, as such, a generic ‘unsupported platform’ error has be solvable, to have a solution or workaround, and it must be found!
Software installs usually logs something to somewhere, XTU not only logs, but kindly points you to the file in the error.
Reading through the log provides a bit of information on how the process works, the lines of interest to finding the more maluable .msi version of the install however looks something like so:
[3954:3EA0][2018-12-06T22:08:07]i370: Session begin, registration key: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{6a0def1c-f6f2-4a5d-81f6-a1b858352c8b}, options: 0x7, disable resume: No
[3954:3EA0][2018-12-06T22:08:07]i000: Caching bundle from: 'C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp\{121CF5FA-9A1A-42B2-837C-618F7F34F73D}\.be\XTUSetup.exe' to: 'C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{6a0def1c-f6f2-4a5d-81f6-a1b858352c8b}\XTUSetup.exe'
[3954:3EA0][2018-12-06T22:08:08]i320: Registering bundle dependency provider: {6a0def1c-f6f2-4a5d-81f6-a1b858352c8b}, version: 6.4.1.25
[3954:3EA0][2018-12-06T22:08:08]i371: Updating session, registration key: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{6a0def1c-f6f2-4a5d-81f6-a1b858352c8b}, resume: Active, restart initiated: No, disable resume: No
[3954:47BC][2018-12-06T22:08:09]i305: Verified acquired payload: XTUInstaller.msi at path: C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\.unverified\XTUInstaller.msi, moving to: C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{275588D7-6C9D-4FB0-BBAE-2FA3F7C2DADB}v6.4.1.25\XTUInstaller.msi.
[3954:3EA0][2018-12-06T22:08:09]i323: Registering package dependency provider: {275588D7-6C9D-4FB0-BBAE-2FA3F7C2DADB}, version: 6.4.1.25, package: XTUInstaller.msi
[3954:3EA0][2018-12-06T22:08:09]i301: Applying execute package: XTUInstaller.msi, action: Install, path: C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{275588D7-6C9D-4FB0-BBAE-2FA3F7C2DADB}v6.4.1.25\XTUInstaller.msi, arguments: ' ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT="1" MSIFASTINSTALL="7" REMOVEALLAPPDATA=""'
[3954:3EA0][2018-12-06T22:09:33]e000: Error 0x80070643: Failed to install MSI package.
[3954:3EA0][2018-12-06T22:09:33]e000: Error 0x80070643: Failed to execute MSI package.
[476C:243C][2018-12-06T22:09:33]e000: Error 0x80070643: Failed to configure per-machine MSI package.
[476C:243C][2018-12-06T22:09:33]i319: Applied execute package: XTUInstaller.msi, result: 0x80070643, restart: None
[476C:243C][2018-12-06T22:09:33]e000: Error 0x80070643: Failed to execute MSI package.
Note the GUID {} in the log.
Navigate to the C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{275588D7-6C9D-4FB0-BBAE-2FA3F7C2DADB}v6.4.1.25 folder and copy the XTUInstaller.msi file to any new location, for example, C:\XTU. save this for later.
Taking it one more step on the logging front, located in the %temp% (C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp) directory, another .log file shows up, Intel_Extreme_Tuning_Utility_20181206220727_000_XTUInstaller.msi.log.
Having a read, some very promising lines start showing up:
Action start 22:08:09: RunDetectPlatform. DetectPlatform: Found unsupported device 9D21 DetectPlatform: Found unsupported device 5914 DetectPlatform: Found unsupported device 9D60 DetectPlatform: Found unsupported device 9D14
So, we’re looking to run the XTUInstaller.msi installer, but not only that, we’d need it to skip the RunDetectPlatform section.
The way you run .msi files from commandline is using the msiexec command, link
point msiexec to the .msi file using the /i flag, msiexec /i XTUInstaller.msi
follow that with the PROPERTY=value, msiexec /i XTUInstaller.msi DISABLEPLATFORMCHECK=1
C:\XTU>dir
Volume in drive C is Windows
Volume Serial Number is 843F-CDA6
Directory of C:\XTU
2018-12-07 23:50 <DIR> .
2018-12-07 23:50 <DIR> ..
2018-12-06 22:23 23 396 352 XTUInstaller.msi
1 File(s) 23 396 352 bytes
2 Dir(s) 352 121 561 088 bytes free
C:\XTU>msiexec /i XTUInstaller.msi DISABLEPLATFORMCHECK=1
Where did we get the DISABLEPLATFORMCHECK property and value from?
Using OrcaMSI I was able to take a look within the .msi finding out that RunDetectPlatform runs on a condition, setting DISABLEPLATFORMCHECK to 1 skips the whole thing.
One more thing to note is that XTU runs on Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0, in case of more errors, a manual update to SP1 could do wonders.