MSI Afterburner

I got a new RTX 4060 ti last week. Should I be using MSI Afterburner? I installed it and I didn’t know what to do with it. My GPU temp fluctuates between 70c and 79c when I play D4.

Do nothing.

GPUs are fine at those temperatures. NVidia themselves doesn’t even set the base thermal throttling value that low - it won’t start actively trying to restrict anything until you reach 83°c. Even then the card would be comfortable running at 90°c (the default maximum thermal limit) for extended periods, and the silicone itself is good for up to around 125°c during operation in short bursts.

If you feel the absolute need to do something, lower the Temp Limit slider. I wouldn’t go any lower than 73°c without decoupling the Power Limit slider, as this corresponds to a 70% power limit - lower than that and the card may no longer enter P0 clock states (ie Performance will drop significantly).

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those are cool temps, GPU chips vary in temp and settings from chip to chip but most won’t even think about throttling until 105c-110c. If your temps break 100c, you need to worry about fan settings and better cooling. At 79c peak, enjoy the card as you you don’t have any temp issues to worry about.

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Thx for the tips, everyone. It looks like the default fan curve is more than adequate for my setup.

Have you checked your GPU usage? Diablo 4 probably isn’t even maxing out your GPU. If so, it’s a poor game to base decisions about your fan curve on.

I prefer to set custom fan curves that are more aggressive than stock. Stock fan curves are designed to keep the card quiet as long as possible so that customers don’t get angry about the noise - doesn’t matter if the card is cooking itself or not. As long as the card lasts a couple of years before it dies, that’s good enough for the GPU maker, as it won’t hurt their sales at that point; might even help as you’ll be forced to buy a new card at that point.

There have been generations where certain cards were labeled as a “dust-buster” and it definitely hurt sales. In my situation, I don’t really care about the noise. I have a lot of fans in my computer already and usually game with my headphones on anyway. I’d rather have a card that still works 10 years from now.

D4 is actually more GPU intensive than it’s supposed to be.

Okay not to necro this thread but…

70c to 80C is 158f to 176F. That’s almost a hot temperature.

as i said previously, in terms of chips that are designed to work at full performance at temps that will exceed 100c; temps in the 70’s are considered “cool” while the chip is in full use and of no need to worry about.

Oh, hell. I uninstalled my MSI program because I thought I didn’t need it with my 4070 GPU. Should I re-install it? I do my best to avoid Microsoft and that looked like a Miscrosoft product. Really - do I need it? It looked it was trying to sell me more games.

If it was trying to sell you more games you downloaded something which was repackaged to include extra crap. The base Afterburner program doesn’t have anything like that, even in the installer - it’s just for monitoring graphics cards and changing a few clock and limit settings. The included (optional) Rivatuner is again just for doing graphics card monitoring stuff, but includes some different features like framerate limiting and monitoring.

Should you want to get a new copy, make sure to grab it from Guru3D. That’s the official source.

MSI is a Taiwanese hardware ODM, Micro-Star International. They have nothing at all to do with Microsoft.

MSI afterburner is actually developed by a Russian who has a licensing agreement with the
tech company MSI. Other GPU add in board companies have similar offerings such as Asus GPU Tweak. You can check the respective site of your GPU’s brand to see their software. Always download directly from their sites (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.,) to avoid other malware issues.

Both guru3D and MSI have the latest version minus the malware that plagues other sites. The developer, Alexey Nicolaychuk, goes by the handle Unwinder and posts on the guru3d forum.

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RivaTuner? Do I need that one as well? Or delete? Thanks again, Lilybugg and Asterchades

I assume we are talking about RTSS (you can download it from Guru3D) which works in conjunction with MSI afterbruner. Not sure what your specific needs are but my guess is you just want fan curve control? Afterburner by itself will do that job. RTSS with afterburner will give you a more robust overlay for hardware and performance monitoring than just afterburner alone if that is what you are after. If you don’t need or want all that information than you can skip RTSS.

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Sorry for my ignorance, my friend, but I don’t know what RTSS is. Afterburner came with Rivatuner, and I haven’t actually had time to see what each program does. I just didn’t want to download too much (if any) “bloatware”.

My “game day” has been cut short due to my wife’s needing to go and come from her dialysis and other appointments, so right now, I’m just using what time there is available to set things up again. When Asterchades wrote what he did about MSI, I just looked up Guru3D and went to download it (by the way that site has a lot of “come on and download this” ads, so one has to be careful).

Heretofore, I have used SPECCY as a monitor of my fan temp, but if MSI is better, I will keep it and educate myself as I can to its use.

ETA: APOLOGIES to Asterchades who did mention “Rivatuner” in his reply

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RTSS = RivaTuner Statistics Server

the old rivatuner that you may remember is no longer updated (since 2009). It was developed by the same guy as afterburner and is used as a “backbone” to many other programs including afterburner. You can simply think of afterburner as an updated form of the old rivatuner.

speccy is nice little program and if it does the job for you that’s great
I personally use HWinfo to monitor my temps and fan speeds. You can try it out if you like, its free on their own web site so no bloatware or you can stick with speccy.

I get it, but it’s not something you should be hitting when doing something intensive ideally.