MSI Afterburner's sole developer, Alexey Nicolaychuk, is working on a new update for the app that will expand its voltage support for overclocking enthusiasts. In an update on the Guru3D forums , Nicolaychuk revealed that he's working on "triple channel voltage" aimed at future MSI graphics cards that will expand voltage control beyond just core voltage manipulation.
Triple-channel voltage control will allow users to control two additional voltage parameters on future MSI graphics cards: memory voltage and aux (MSVDD) voltage. Core voltage control also gets an upgrade, boasting a direct PWM access mode featuring an expanded 100mV offset range for these cards.
This is a significant upgrade over Nvidia's default voltage controls found on its Founders Edition graphics cards and many third-party cards. GPU voltage controls by default do not allow access to memory or auxiliary voltage control, and core voltage control is limited to a 20mV offset.
This new tech will be limited to future MSI RTX 50 series graphics cards, at least for now. Nicolaychuk frustratingly explains that this tech can't be adapted to other graphics card models (including outgoing MSI RTX 50 series GPUs), due to limitations in Nvidia's default voltage controls. RTX 50 series graphics card models that use Nvidia's reference design blacklist I2C devices at the driver level, making voltage controllers invisible to software trying to access them through the I2C bus.
However, Nicolaychuk clarified that future GPUs other than supported MSI models could work with triple channel voltage control, as long as those GPUs don't adhere to Nvidia's reference design and feature modified software to access the I2C bus. We'll have to wait and see if any brands other than MSI decide to make RTX 50 series GPUs with these modifications. These GPUs will likely be cards focused on extreme overclocking.
Memory voltage control is arguably the most interesting addition of the new triple-channel voltage control. Modern Nvidia graphics cards can be heavily memory-bound depending on the application, and can gain as much performance from memory overclocking as GPU overclocking alone. Having memory voltage control will allow overclockers to boost the voltage of Blackwell's GDDR7 memory modules, something that hasn't been possible with previous graphics cards.
The improved 100mv offset range for GPU core overclocking could be promising, but Nvidia's latest implementation of GPU voltage offset limits users to the maximum voltage the GPU is allowed to pull at stock speeds. Limiting voltage offsets on the core to boost voltage earlier in the GPU's boosting table. So it is likely this feature won't drastically improve what the GPU offset slider does by default.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Regardless, the addition of triple-channel voltage should significantly improve Blackwell's overclocking headroom on cards that support it.
The only way overclockers have been able to gain serious performance improvements through overclocking on Nvidia's latest GPUs is by using exotic cooling solutions that drop the GPU temperature to ambient or sub-ambient temperatures and using modified firmware that allows the GPU to pull significantly more power than it's supposed to from the factory.
