In this work, we benchmark the well-controlled and numerically accurate exponential thermal tensor renormalization group (XTRG) in the simulation of interacting spin models in two dimensions. Finite temperature introduces a finite thermal correlation length $\xi$, such that for system sizes $L \gg \xi$ finite-size calculations actually simulate the thermodynamic limit. In this paper, we focus on the square lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet (SLH) and quantum Ising models (QIM) on open and cylindrical geometries up to width W=10.