Intel Power Gadget is a new tool from Intel that can be used to monitor the power consumption of Intel based processors. It works with all the Intel Core processors from 2nd generation to the 10th generation. However, Intel Atom processors are not supported. With the help of this gadget, we can see the real-time graphical view of how power is consumed by various cores of the processor.
Intel Power Gadget is available for both Mac and Windows. In either case, it shows a gadget side bar on the desktop. The gadget contains many graphs for different items such as package power, package frequency, CPU utilization, GPU frequency, GPU utilization, package temperature and DRAM power. The most important of these is obviously the package power as it goes up whenever you run CPU hungry applications such as video encoders, file encryption or games.
You will notice that many of these real-time graphs have an upper limit which gives an idea about the current consumption. For example, it shows the maximum power limit for the package power, maximum temperature limit for the package temperature, and the base frequency for the CPU frequency. The current values cannot cross these upper limits. In fact when the current package temperature nears the maximum limit, the computer becomes very slow or even shuts down.
In the options for Intel Power Gadget, we can choose whether to save the log file with timestamps or choose a single file for a continuous log. We can also resize the GUI if it is appearing too small on your large size screen. There are options for choosing an update frequency for displaying the new data in the GUI and for saving the logs to the file. If your motherboard uses multiple Intel CPU packages, then you can choose which of these are to be used for the GUI data display.
You can download Intel Power Gadget from https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/intel-power-gadget.html.