MSI Afterburner's developer seems to have received samples of the company's future RTX 50 GPUs with advanced OC features.
MSI Preps RTX 50 "Extreme OC" GPU, As Afterburner Dev Receives First Sample With Advanced Overclocking Features
It looks like MSI is working on its very own "Extreme OC" variant based on the RTX 50 GPUs as unveiled by MSI Afterburner's developer, Unwinder. The dev revealed that he has got his first working samples of future MSI RTX 50 GPUs with advanced overclocking features such as "Unlocked Extended Voltage Control". As such, the upcoming BETA versions of Afterburner will carry an extended suite of OC features.
Last month, Unwinder revealed some initial details of his work on the next Beta, which would be released this month. According to him, the new version will add support for MP2988 and MP29816A controllers (PWM). These PWM controllers are featured on most RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs, but due to NVIDIA's restrictions, they can't be used. However, it looks like MSI has worked with NVIDIA to allow them to utilize the PWM controller's capabilities through certain alterations.
Autumn started and September MSI AB beta with MP2988/MP29816A support, announced in the previous post, is around the corner. We've got first working samples of future MSI 50x0 graphics cards with unlocked extended voltage control and currently testing new beta with it.
On such future MSI cards you'll get extended triple channel voltage control and monitoring. Triple channel control includes core voltage control (direct PWM access mode with +-100mV range instead of default NVIDIA's GPU boost voltage control on refrence design cards, with is allowing you to get just 0 to ~20mV (0 to 100%) overvoltage range), memory voltavge control and aux (MSVDD) voltage control. In addition to that it will unlock VRM temeprature monitoring (on-die MP29816A temperature sensor).
Sadly, as I mentioned above, it won't work on current reference design 5080/5090 cards because NVIDIA locked access to such PWM controllers there.MSI Afterburner Dev (via Guru3D Forums)
Once again, this would only be available on these future "Extreme OC" designs from MSI. Besides this, MSI Afterburner will also offer support for triple-channel voltage control and monitoring. The Triple-Channel voltage control will enable direct PWM access mode with +-100mV range instead of the current default mode, which only lets you set the voltage between 0 to ~20mV. There will also be onboard VRM temperature monitoring through the on-die MP29816A temperature sensor on these new GPUs from MSI.
Once again, these features will only work with the new MSI RTX 50 cards designed for "Extreme OC" and won't be available on existing models. Talking about models, it very much looks like this "Extreme OC" model could be a new Lightning RTX 5090/5080 series graphics card.
The Lightning series hasn't seen action in a long time, at least since the RTX 20 series, which saw the last version in the form of RTX 2080 Ti Lightning OC. After that, MSI switched to its newer SUPRIM series as the flagship variant, but it looks like we are getting some Lightning action again!
News Sources: Guru3D Forums , Uniko's Hardware
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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