The MSI Afterburner 4.6.6 Beta update was released three days ago—available to download through Guru3D's distribution section—its patch notes tease the exciting addition of "some future NVIDIA GPU PCI DeviceIDs to (our) hardware database." The forward facing nature of this software upgrade brings some unfortunate news for Windows XP operating system users—Beta version 4.6.6's top bullet point provides some reasoning: "Ported to VC++ 2022 compiler. Please take a note that due to this change MSI Afterburner will no longer be able to start under Windows XP. Please stay on the previous versions of the product if you need this OS support." Unwinder's software engineering team has traditionally stuck with the 2008 Visual C++ compiler, hence Afterburner's long history of supporting Windows XP.

The adoption of a more modern compiler has signaled the end for MSI's overclocking and hardware monitoring program on a legacy operating system. Developers largely moved on from XP-supporting endeavors around the mid-2010s—as pointed out by Tom's Hardware: "To get an idea on how late Afterburner is on dropping Windows XP, the last time we reported on any app ending support for the OS was in 2019, when Steam ended support on New Year's Day." Returning to the modern day—4.6.6 Beta's best-of-list mentions that RivaTuner Statistics Server is host to "more than 90 compatibility enhancements and changes"—v7.3.5 rolls out with NVIDIA Reflex and PresentMon integration, as well as programmable conditional layers support. The other headlining feature addition within Afterburner's latest pre-release guise is voltage control for AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT GPUs.

As a leading brand in True Gaming hardware, MSI is excited to introduce the GAMING SLIM Family, a new graphics card series powered by NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series graphics processors. While maintaining the most iconic GAMING elements from the long-standing MSI GAMING series, GAMING SLIM is even thinner and lighter, allowing for flexible system assembly while promising high-performance capabilities. The GAMING SLIM series is available with the GeForce RTX 4090, GeForce RTX 4080, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, GeForce RTX 4070, and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti graphics processors.

Powered by NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace architecture, RTX 40 Series graphics cards offer unparalleled speed, ushering in a new era of performance, immersive gaming, AI capabilities, and lightning-fast content creation for gamers and creators alike.

An unusual MSI RTX 3080 Ti SUPRIM X graphics card is up for sale, second hand, on Facebook Marketplace—the Sydney, Australia-based seller is advertising this component as a truly custom model with a non-standard allocation of VRAM: "Yes this is 20 GB not 12 GB." The used item is said to be in "good condition" with its product description elaborating on a bit of history: "There are some scuff marks from the previous owner, but the card works fine. It is an extremely rare collector's item, due to NVIDIA cancelling these variants a month before release. This is not an engineering sample card—this was a finished OEM product that got cancelled, unfortunately." The seller is seeking AU$1100 (~$740 USD), after a reduction from the original asking price of AU$1,300 (~$870 USD).

MSI and Gigabyte were reportedly on the verge of launching GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB variants two years ago, but NVIDIA had a change of heart (probably due to concerns about costs and production volumes) and decided to stick with a public release of the standard 12 GB GPU. Affected AIBs chose to not destroy their stock of 20 GB cards—these were instead sold to crypto miners and shady retailers. Wccftech points out that mining-oriented units have identifying marks on their I/O ports.

As a leading brand in True Gaming hardware, MSI unveils the latest line-up of graphics cards featuring the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, with the GAMING and VENTUS 2X BLACK series, which are available starting on June 29th, 2023.

The latest MSI GeForce RTX 4060 series graphics cards are designed to deliver incredible performance for mainstream gamers and creators at 1080p resolution at high frame rates with ray tracing and DLSS 3. The GeForce RTX 4060 GPU product delivers all the advancements of the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture—including DLSS 3 neural rendering, third-generation ray tracing technologies at high frame rates, and an eighth generation NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC) with AV1 encoding

MSI Afterburner has been finally updated to a new version, the v4.6.5, bringing support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series and AMD Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards. MSI Afterburner has been one of the most popular overclocking and monitoring tools for graphics cards, especially since the EVGA Precision X has been discontinued, but it has hit a snag back in 2022 when the developer was not paid by MSI.

The latest update is a big milestone for Afterburner, as the new version 4.6.5 is a stable release and comes after the Afterburner was not updated in a while due to the fact that the developer Alexey Nicolaychuk, who goes by the name Unwinder over at Guru3D, was not paid by MSI. While there were BETA updates in the meantime, there has not been a stable release since 2019. The new version adds support for both NVIDIA RTX 40 series and AMD Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards, adds experimental support for Intel's 13th Gen Core CPUs and AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, as well as brings plenty of other fixes.

Update: Unwinder notified us that the previous stable Afterburner 4.6.4 release was published in the end of 2021 (03.12.2021).

MSI Afterburner is arguably the most popular graphics card overclocking utility that everyone from gamers to professional overclockers swear by. It is used across graphics card brands, and helps you tune up both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. While you enjoy Afterburner with your new-generation GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" and Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA3 GPUs that were released in 2022, do remember that Afterburner's developer hasn't been paid a penny for it.

MSI Afterburner is developed by Russian national Alexey Nicolaychuk, who goes by the name Unwinder across tech forums. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early-2022, MSI stopped payments to Unwinder citing "political reasons." Unwinder had been independently (read: without payment) supporting Afterburner out of personal interest throughout 2022 in hopes that MSI would figure out a way to pay him. Interestingly, MSI PC hardware continued to be sold in the Russian market throughout 2022. Despite continuing to develop Afterburner throughout 2022 without payment, MSI hasn't resolved its payments. In a community post, Unwinder announced that he is finally calling it quits, and is halting development of the app. This development ensures that the app works reliably with new GPUs as they're being launched, fixes bugs, and patches security issues.

MSI Afterburner is arguably the most popular graphics card overclocking utility, and the best place to find it is the MSI website. There are several other sites that redistribute the utility, many of them are trustworthy PC enthusiast tech publications; but some of them are not. There are some dubious websites that are using SEO techniques and ad-placements to find their way into online search results, appearing to be download mirrors for MSI Afterburner. While some of these sites are just in it for some web-traffic ad revenue, others downright spoof the MSI website (i.e. are visual clones), and host redistributables of Afterburner, only these have a more sinister motive—to infect you with malware.

Cybersecurity researchers at Cyble identified such spoof websites that are visually identical to the MSI website; which host modified versions of the Afterburner software laced with malware. This malware can infect your PC with a multitude of bad stuff, including cryptojacking (using your PC's system resources to mine cryptocurrency for the attacker); and data-theft. Cyble deconstructed the malware-laced Afterburner installer in a bid to identify its nature. Apparently it uses Monero XMR miner software to mine cryptocurrency. Apparently the attacker repackaged Afterburner into a custom installer that, in addition to installing Afterburner, fetches XMR miner from the Internet and infects Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) with a cryptojacking payload. The easiest way to avoid this is sticking to known sources such as the MSI website (www.msi.com); or known websites authorized to redistribute Afterburner. If infected, SFC (system file checker), coupled with Windows Defender or other popular antivirus software should help.

MSI is informing the public of a malicious software being disguised as the official MSI Afterburner software. The malicious software is being unlawfully hosted on a suspicious website impersonating as MSI's official website with the domain name https://afterburner-msi.space. MSI has no relation with this website or the aforementioned domain.

The fraudulent website imitates MSI's official webpage appearance and design, and offers downloads for MSI's Afterburner. This webpage is hosting software which may contain virus, trojan, keylogger, or other type of malicious program that have been disguised to look like MSI Afterburner. The Public is warned not to download any software from this website!Update May 14th: TechPowerUp Forums member silentbogo detected the host and CDN behind the malicious Afterburner app, and reported it to them. In response to these reports, the CDN, Hipolink, has deleted the accounts responsible for this, while the host, timeweb.ru, said that they are investigating this. Our Kudos to silentbogo.

One of the runaway features for NVIDIA's latest RTX-20 series of graphics cards was the introduction of support for the OC Scanner feature - a program that automagically tests a range of frequencies on your NVIDIA graphics card and overclocks it to a deemed "stable" sweet-spot. This practically obviates the need for manual fine-tuning, though of course, the best results should always be found down that road - provided there's enough tinkering.

The latest version of MSI's Afterburner (v4.6.0 beta 10, available in the source link) now brings this functionality to Pascal-based graphics cards (besides some other features, such as voltage control, for Turing; check the entire release notes after the break). Have fun.

Rumors of a forthcoming GTX 1070 Ti have been circulating for some time now, but today saw the first concrete evidence of the existence of NVIDIA's latest card. MSI, a NVIDIA add-in card partner, has preempted the official announcement, by adding core voltage control for reference design NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti series graphics cards to MSI Afterburner 4.4.0 Beta 19. The latest build also includes numerous other changes, which are detailed in the source. As we reported earlier, the GTX 1070 Ti is part of NVIDIA's anticipated addition to its performance SKUs ahead of the holiday season and is, of course, a response to the release of AMD's latest GPUs, RX Vega 56 & Vega 64.

Today we release an updated Beta revision of Afterburner, this application successfully secured the leading position on graphics card utilities. We're happy to see MSI Afterburner is leading the overclock applications. MSI Afterburner 2.2.0 Beta 8 is ready.

There's quite an extensive change list too, including things like faster startup and unlocking of additional hidden video capture formats. Go get it here.