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Description
MSI Afterburner is one of the popular overclocking programs as it gives you full control over your graphics cards. You can use it for custom fan profiles, benchmarking and video recording, and the best part is that it will work with graphics cards from all brands.
Created to transform the workflow for film and video professionals, Afterburner accelerates ProRes and ProRes RAW video codecs in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and supported third-party applications. A PCI Express card exclusively for Mac Pro, Afterburner can be installed in any full-length slot, but it delivers maximum capability in a PCIe x16 slot.
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MSI’s graphics card overclocking utility “Afterburner” has been around for eight years now. It’s been through a lot of testing and tweaks.
Every gamer wants to free up extra performance from their game machines- even if it means opening the bedroom window in the wintertime. So overclocking has always been a compelling idea, though it’s a bit intimidating to those without some computer engineering experience.
So, in 2012, MSI Afterburner arrived to give gamers more control over their graphics cards. If you know anything about traditional overclocking then you know there are some risks. If you go, overboard, it’s quite easy to overheat your machine.
There are a few ways to deal with that risk. You can invest in new fans. You can buy, or build, a cooling water system- which I thought was crazy the first time I heard about it. Or you can download a CPU monitor that tells you how hard your computer is working, how hot it is, and warns you if things get too dicey inside the tower.
So, Afterburner came along and delivered an immensely detailed overview of the state of the user’s hardware with full control over the speed and performance of the graphics card. But here’s where it gets weird. It also comes with benchmarking and video recording features- and on top of all that- it’s free and can be used with any graphics card.
Other features include triple overvoltage, monitor minimum or maximum for greater ease in recording system status, several slots for profile saves and loading, automatic profile switching, AVI, and MPG support, and custom frame rate and quality to control the size, advanced, and multi-threaded fan speed control.
At a glance, the interface you get with Afterburner is impressive. It tells you just about everything you could want to know about your machine’s performance at a glance. You’ll see levels bars for;
- Core voltage (mV)
- Core clock (MHz)
- Shader Clock (MHz)
- Memory clock (MHz)
- Fan speed% (A total of the fan’s maximum speed.)
You also get running graphs for GPU temperature, voltage, and others mentioned above. The one thing that got our eyebrows raised was the fan speed percentage meter. How does it know what the fan’s performance capability is? Do fans come with software that tells MSI Afterburner exactly how fast they can spin? That seems a little bit optimistic.
It also calls into question the ability of these metrics to remain accurate across a range of systems and hardware profiles. However, what you will get is consistency. That means, when you get to know your machine by using MSI Afterburner, you develop a good idea of how your computer is handling the extra power. All in all, it is a very high-quality overclocker and system monitor.
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. Is predominantly a 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. 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.
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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. IDGMSI Afterburner's settings window.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.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. Performance IDGRivatuner Statistics TunerFor 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. ConclusionA 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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