Home directory for bundled version of JDK in IntelliJ IDEA

Question

I have JDK 7 installed on my machine, but I want to compile against JDK 8 using IntelliJ IDEA.

In the window that opens when choosing Help > About, there is the following line:

JRE: 1.8.0_51-b16 x86

Well, IDE is running on Java 8. In fact, here it states:

JDK is bundled with all the product installers and it's recommended that you will use the provided JDK version unless there are any specific issues.

That's great! I should be able to use the bundled version with my projects too. But where is that JDK located?

When selecting the home directory for a new project, the default path is C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition 15.0.1\jre, but it doesn't work.

The selected directory is not a valid home for JDK

After exploring a bit, I found C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition 15.0.1\jre\jre\bin. It contains many files, even some called java.exe and javaw.exe, but it doesn't work.

So where is the home directory for the bundled version of the JDK installed with IDEA?

Answer 1

If you want to know, where the bundled JDK is, try this:
[Ctrl+Shift+A] within IDEA and type "JDK" and select "Switch IDE Boot JDK"
You should see the bundled directory and you can switch to an other JDK path.
Please be aware that Java 8 is required to run IntelliJ IDEA starting from version 2016 on all the supported platforms.

EDIT:
Starting with version 2019.1:
[Ctrl+Shift+A] within IDEA and type and select "Choose Runtime..." (requires the 'Choose Runtime' Plugin)

Selecting-the-JDK-version-the-IDE-will-run-under