Msi Afterburner Overclocking

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  1. What Is MSI Afterburner? MSI Afterburner is an overclocking app. Overclocking programs are those that make your graphics card perform at a higher than its optimum level. It does so by managing the various components of your system’s GPU like core clock, core voltage, power limit, memory clock and fan speed.
  2. GPU Boost 3.0 - Voltage/Frequency Curve Tweaking. Basically with future updates in overclocking software you will see three new stages of clock frequency control. Basic, Linear and manual modes. Unwinder (the programmer of AfterBurner) has been hard at work with AfterBurner to get the what is called a V/F curve implementation ready.

MSI Afterburner is a graphics utility developed by the GPU manufacturer, MSI. It assists with overclocking, monitoring in-game graphics performance, benchmarking, and video capture. It offers a whole bunch of cool features and benefits which we will touch upon in more detail as the article goes on.

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  • MSI Afterburner

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MSI Afterburner isn’t exactly game capture software, but like Nvidia’s GeForce Experience, it's a popular program that gaming enthusiasts might already have on their system. Afterburner is predominantly a graphics card overclocking tool—and not just MSI graphics cards, either—that comes with a second download called RivaTuner Statistics Server. RTSS is a great tool for limiting the frame rates of your games if your GPU is working harder than necessary. Together these two pieces of software can not only overclock and tweak your system, but record game capture video as well.

Note: This review is part of our roundup of the best game capture software. Go there for details about competing products and how we tested them.

In Afterburner 4.5.0 you get to the video capture settings by clicking on the settings cog icon in the center of the main dashboard. Then in the new window that opens, use the scroll arrows in the upper right corner to get to the Video capture tab. By default, you configure your own hotkey to start recording, but you can also set it to automatically record every time you start a game.

There are many other settings below that. You can change the video and container formats, for example, though your choices are limited. The default video format is MJPG, but there’s also VFW, NV12, and RTV-1. As for the container format (the file type for the video) your only choices are AVI and MKV. Still, this is a power user tool and for those who care it’s an excellent opportunity to customize video captures.

/pokemon-go-free-apk-download.html. Afterburner also lets you set the quality type as a percentage as opposed to the usual “low, medium, and high” options.

You can adjust the frame size, the frame rate (from 0 up to 100), frame rate limit, and where you want to save your files. For audio you can record both the game sounds and your own microphone.

Some of these features are quite common in other suites, but the fine grain tools—such as the frame size, and the choice of compression and container formats—are not.

Partnersprovides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.The Conversation UK receives funding from these organisations. Author.Deputy Head, Computer Science and Software Engineering, Faculty of Information & Communication Technologies, Swinburne University of TechnologyDisclosure statementJames H. Hamlyn-Harris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Dish tv card hack.

Performance

For this round of testing, we used our standard budget test rig and left all settings as-is with no adjustments, the only exception being that we set ctrl + F5 to be our hotkey for starting a recording.

Running the Metro: Last Light Redux benchmark three times with everything set to low, our rig went from an average frame rate of 58.67 without recording software active down to an abominable 39fps with Afterburner engaged. It went from nearly hitting the “golden standard” of 60 frames per second to just barely above console level. That’s still playable, mind you, but it offers a striking difference in play quality.

Testing with The Division benchmark didn’t fare much better,. Without Afterburner running we were hitting 56.3 frames per second, and that dropped to 42.5fps with the capture software running.

Conclusion

A lot of PC enthusiasts adore MSI Afterburner as an overclocking tool, and with a mid- to high range gaming machine, Afterburner’s screen capture tools are probably just fine. If you’ve got a budget rig, however, you can do much better. On top of that, Afterburner is not easy to use, the amount of tweaking is probably overkill for most, and the fact that it depends on Riva Statistics Tuner (meaning you need two tools to do one job) isn’t great.

Bottom line? This is not the screen capture tool you’re looking for.

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  • MSI Afterburner

    See it

    MSI Afterburner is a popular overclocking tool and comes from a trusted name in gaming. It's abilities as

    Pros

    • Video capture tool inside a program some already use
    • Video settings are highly customizable

    Cons

    • Big impact on performance for budget systems in our tests
    • Requires some configuration

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Overclocking with Pascal GPUs

So before we begin to explore the new options, first this: the 'old way' of overclocking still is possible, in reality this would be what is referred to as basic mode, yet managed by the sliders that you guys all know and like.

When you want to overclock typically you need to verify and stabilize your tested settings. First off let us remind you that we always recommend increments of roughly 25 MHz on core and memory (from the default base clock frequency upwards). In the first stage you overclock your GPU, in the second the memory. Once you get artifacts or a lockup, back down 25 to 50 MHz and typically that is your stable result in it's highest threshold -- under the condition that the room temperature is the same (yes GPU heat and surrounding heat have an influence on your overclock). Related to heat is your graphics card cooling system. If you are willing to allow more noise, increase the fan RPM on the GPU towards a higher setting that you find comfortable. Cooling helps with overclocking, it's as simple as that. That backside of your graphics card however gets hot as well, give it some airflow too. So make sure your PC casing is well ventilated with decent airflow.


AfterBurner 3.0.0 (to be released) comes with GPU and memory tuning, overvolting, allowing control and adjustment parameters for overclocking.
OriginalThis sampleOverclocked
Core Clock: 1607 MHzCore Clock: 1607 MHzCore Clock: 1697MHz
Boost Clock: 1733 MHzBoost Clock: 1733 MHzBoost Clock: 1925~1975 MHz
Memory Clock: 10000 MHzMemory Clock: 10000 MHzMemory Clock: 10800 MHz


For a regular (mild) tweak/overclock you could do something like above. As stated on the previous page, the Core Voltage control is now based on the percentage of maximum voltage frequency. Fixed offsets like +80mV are a thing of the past. Personally I am not a fan of this, but this is obviously by design from Nvidia. We applied:

  • Power Target 120%
  • Priority is set at power target and not temperature Target
  • CPU clock +90 MHz
  • Memory clock +400 MHz
  • Voltage +75% (voltage is now an offset percentage).
  • Fan control RPM fixed at 60% (a little more noisy but doable).
Depending on the card quality (GPU leakage), ambient heat and other factors you might need to drop another 15~25 MHz on the core clock offset but from what I have seen, the example shown above, is very stable on founder edition GeForce GTX 1080 cards. Now with this overclock we have extra performance at our hands, as the boost clock will now work in the ~1.950 GHz marker depending on the power and temperature offsets. This method is similar to the 'basic' tweaking methodology we'll discuss in the next paragraph. Mind you that the 1950 MHz denoted is the clock frequency with the Unigine Heaven benchmark. That Boost frequency will pretty much differ per game/application. A more easy to render game will easily pass the 2.0 GHz marker, we've even seen 2.1 GHz. But the regular benchmarks are all hard on the GPU, the utilization, temp and power limiters will kick in and down-clock the GPU towards a scenario that remains stable.

GPU Boost 3.0 - Voltage/Frequency Curve Tweaking

Above Linear mode Curve tweaking (increase clock frequency with a relative but fixed offset in MHz).

So before we begin I like you to have a look at the AfterBurner screenshot above. Next to default overclocking with added that added core voltage %, Nvidia came up with a new methodology as explained in the GPU Boost 3.0 paragraph on the previous page and our Pascal GPU related articles. Basically with future updates in overclocking software you will see three new stages of clock frequency control. Basic, Linear and manual modes. Unwinder (the programmer of AfterBurner) has been hard at work with AfterBurner to get the what is called a V/F curve implementation ready. What you see here today is still in beta, however is being released today for you guys to try out as limited beta.

Mind you, this only will work with Pascal GPUs, meaning GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 Founder editions. Later on more products will be supported as Nvidia is bound to release more Pascal SKUs.

Above basic or preferred mode Curve tweaking

Guidelines for using V/F Curve control

So how do you activate the new curve clock frequency control ? First off, you'll need a GeForce GTX 1070 or 1080 Founders edition or MSI Pascal based product (mind you that the current beta might not hold support just yet for all SKUs).

In this beta (4.3.0 Beta 3) there is no special button in the skin to launch the voltage/frequency editor, it is accessible via <Ctrl>+<F> keyboard shortcut. When voltage/frequency editor window is active and focused you can do the following things there:

  • Adjust offsets for each point individually via dragging it with mouse ('manual' mode).
  • Put an anchor on the edge of screen and use linear curve scaling via dragging any point with mouse and holding <Ctrl> button ('linear' mode).
  • Apply the same fixed offset to all curve points via dragging any point with mouse and holding <Shift> button (let's call that 'basic' mode).
  • While you're adjusting the curve you can apply the settings from main window and see how curve is changing in real-time, or you can use traditional clock controls (clock slider and clock text field) to see how they affect the curve.
  • Press <Ctrl>+<D> to reset curve to default state
Now I have been fooling around with the new beta for a bit and we are able to reach the ~2025 MHz domain stable (depending on the software title in easy games we'd get 2100 MHz and on heavy ones like FireStrike 1950 MHz), you can obviously choose your preferred tweaking methodology I seem to prefer the basic mode by pointing at say 2050MHz combined with the control key. Basic mode can be used by pressing the SHIFT key and then drag around the Frequency points. This is very much the same as tweaking with the traditional core clock frequency slider as it'll add an offset towards the clock frequency, e.g. +100 MHz offset.

Msi Afterburner Overclocking Software

(you can click on the image to enlarge it - at this tweaking stage we haven't even touched added voltage on the GPU)