A rule of thumb is that MSI Afterburner supports most Geforce and Radeon cards providing that the drivers installed are not to old. Try updating the drivers if the video card is not recognized by the software immediately.

MSI Afterburner is based on Rivatuner, another popular video card configuration software. The program displays a hardware monitor and core information about the graphic card on startup.

The core information include the graphics card name and driver version as well as the core voltage, core clock, shader clock, memory clock and fan speed. The availability of these values depends largely on the graphics card itself, if it is supported it should be shown.

msi afterburner software

Sliders are available to change these core parameters directly. The hardware monitor on the right side displays max and min values. These again depend largely on the capabilities of the video card. It is for instance possible to see the graphics card maximum and minimum temperature, fan speed and core clock changes.

Settings can directly be saved in profiles. This is handy for overclocking or underclocking the graphics card in specific situations. It is for example possible to create one standard profile, one overclocked profile for gaming and other gpu intensive tasks and one underclocked profile for situations where the graphics card is not needed at all.

The settings button leads to an extensive configuration menu. Here it is possible to change the behavior of the card’s fan, the hardware monitoring, on-screen display and profiles among other options.

Fan Speed

The fan speed controls can be changed from automatic to user defined. This opens a graph where the fan speed can be adjusted to the temperature of the graphics card. The fan speed could for instance be lowered if the gpu temperature is low and increased if it increases.

fan speed

Hardware Monitoring

Hardware monitoring graphs can be enabled or disabled in this tab. It is furthermore possible to activate hardware monitoring history logging which can be helpful when troubleshooting video card problems.

hardware monitoring

Hotkeys can be assigned to the profiles that have been created to switch easily between them. There is also an option to set automatic 2D and 3D profiles which will then be automatically enabled whenever the system uses 2D and 3D applications (meaning gpu-less and gpu intensive processes).

An onscreen display can be configured in the MSI Afterburner software to display relevant information directly. This – and some other settings – require a server process that needs to be running in the background.

Computer users with multiple gpus can configure the clock, voltage and fan speed individually or in sync.

MSI Afterburner is an interesting tool for users who want to tweak their graphics card. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Downloads are available directly at the MSI website.

A guy suggested to use the freeware RivaTuner which he said was able to reduce the fan speed of my video card by altering the fan speed directly. This was the solution I was looking for. I quickly downloaded and installed Rivatuner. The only thing left was to lower the fan speed and make the changes permanent.

I clicked on customize in the first screen that appeared right next to Forceware detected and selected the icon for system settings from the panel. The second tab was named fan, the goal of my search. I was able to define a fan speed value for three different states: standard 2D, low power 3D and performance 3D. I changed the settings from 100% to 25 in standard 2D mode, 50% for low power 3D and 100% for performance 3D. 2D means everything that you do normally in windows like using office, surfing the internet or writing an email.

I checked the box that saved the settings and applied them at every system start and voila – the noise was gone. From one second to the next it was gone. My pc is almost silent now, the noisiest part is my external hard drive, everything else is almost silently. (I bought a low noise cpu fan and power supply).

I suggest you take a look at Rivatuner if you face a similar problem like I did. It might solve yours too