Fritz 17 guide on how to play against stockfish engine / help to see if this is correct?

So I am using Fritz 17, its a bit tricky to use, I am using it to play against multiple engines easily, however the reality is not so easily have I done this right because there is not much indication that is what engine is running inside fritz when I start a new game:

Step 1:

I click on classic menu:

Step 2:

Not going to explain how to install another engine as its relatively easy to do but the screenshot below just shows the engines I have installed:

Step 4:

Here I made sure stockfish is the main engine being used:

then I select it in the menu that pops up then click ok:

I can now see that the engine is some sort of implemented in the main windows

Step 5:

To start the new game you would think you click 'New Game' in the 'Home' menu at the top but I found this does nothing. Instead you have to click 'Levels' sub menu then choose an option here, I chose long game for 15 | 10 game.

Next DON'T click OK click start game!

I then begin playing a game against an engine as per below screenshot and as per earlier one the engine no longer says stopped it says stockfish, it also does not allow me to click the blue play button, no other indication anywhere comes up saying what engine I am now playing against.

So my main question is:

Is this actually playing against stockfish engine now or is it playing against fritz by some sort of default? Note the computer is playing against me fine with no issues.

Also does anyone know if its possible to load custom chess pieces into fritz 17?

what the heck is fritz

I haven't used Fritz in many years, so I have no specific input. But, it looks like it's running Stockfish, because I can see the NNUE info. But can't you just look at the Windows task manager when the engine is running to find out the engine's name?

https://en.chessbase.com/products/fritz-17 basically I wanted something that plays against computer engines well, and this was the best GUI I could find after trying many free ones which were over the top with configuration when all I wanted to do was play chess, this even has a one game button play in easy mode which is perfect for beginners, not badly priced either, good if you want endless beginner level matches against decent engines, I am not always online either.

Weirdly since restarting the software it seems to be working better 

https://gyazo.com/17d519b939addfd2a5bee3a88987e55a

I would say this definitely looks like it is working now? I don't know why its so fiddly to start a new game though against a different engine though but thought what I have written above may help someone in the future. I can't see it executing the stockfish exe at the system level in task manager this is possibly because its executing it withing the software, like a sandbox?

Yeah, that sure looks like Stockfish is running. I'm not sure why you can't find Stockfish in the task manager. I guess it's possible that it's being sandboxed, but none of the GUIs I use do that. In task manager, make sure you're looking at processes and not applications. Sometimes it helps to click on the "% CPU" column heading so that the processes using the most CPU are at the top.

Definitely looks like it sandboxes it in the task manager, I tried an open source gui and it actually processes it a lot slower, but like you said in an open source gui it literally shows the exe in the task manager like you said. Is quite interesting why they sandbox it tbh.

That is *one* paranoid company, lol...

hi

Not having that info in the task manager isn't good. Sometimes it's useful to check the task manager to verify how many threads or how much hash an engine is using.

I found a copy of the Fritz 17 manual and searched on the word "manager". Two hits. (Well, technically three, but two were in the same discussion.)

1st hit talks about cloud engines and how you can look at the CPU graph in the task manager to verify that it's not using any CPU resources. But it's just a graph of total CPU usage, not processes in the task manager.

2nd hit - It just talks about how you can change certain settings in the GUI without having to go into the task manager.

As far as I can tell, they don't want you to go into the task manager, at least for engine info. The good news is that it looks like there's a lot of engine info and settings in the GUI. The bad news is that you'll have to depend on the GUI for all engine info. At least, that's the way it appears to me just scanning the manual.

I think for some users that might be bad, but I initially built my PC for AI not for gaming, so it has things like multiple GPU's and such. For me Fritz is actually running better than if I run stock fish in a freeware chess GUI. When I run it in a free GUI the CPU graph goes up and down but in fritz its stable all the time at a constant 60% utilization. Additionally I know my PC by now and am always underclocking more than overclocking in various settings etc... to ensure no overheating. Thanks for the input, gave me a lot to think about and look into if need be. Would be useful if chessbase was more open on this though I guess thats what happens when you get closed source. At least this is a pretty decent guide for people wanting to run stockfish in this engine anyway haha.