On February 15, 2024, the stable version of the MSI Afterburner 4.6.6 video card overclocking utility was released. The previous stable version of MSI Afterburner 4.6.5 became available in April 2023.

MSI Afterburner 4.6.6 update supports voltage control for Radeon RX 7800XT, new Nvidia video cards, Unicode UTF-8, RivaTuner statistics server updated to version 7.3.5, previously found bugs are fixed in the utility.

The project now uses the VC++ 2022 compiler (instead of the previously used VC++ 2008), which is why the new version of the utility cannot run on Windows XP. On these systems, users are recommended to run previous versions of MSI Afterburner.

Also, due to the transition to VC++ 2022, there was a problem of increasing the size of the project distribution. To minimize this situation, the author added to the project his own original tiny web installer for VC++ components, which allowed to significantly reduce the size of the final distribution of the program even in comparison with the previous version based on VC++ 2008. The installation time of the new version of the utility may be slightly increased due to the environment components running VC++ 2022 “on the fly” during installation. If you are installing MSI Afterburner offline, then you can deploy the necessary VC++ 2022 distributions later using the web installer by running .\Redist\VCRedistDeploy.bat.

It is noteworthy that MSI Afterburner version 4.6.5 is still available on the MSI website.

Project developer Oleksiy Nikolaychuk, known in the profile community under the pseudonym Unwinder (on Habra @Unwinder), explained after the release of MSI Afterburner 4.6.6 that MSI webmasters traditionally need a little more time to update content. According to him, it may take a few days before the updated utility is out there and visible to the update checking system (which is also hosted on MSI’s server side).

“Still haven’t received a reply from MSI to my email informing me of the new version release. Considering that they are currently celebrating Chinese New Year, it may take a lot longer to release the new build on MSI.com – maybe a few weeks instead of a few days as I originally expected,” the utility’s author clarified.

In April 2023, the author of the Unwinder project explained after the release of MSI Afterburner 4.6.5 that he was continuing to work on the tool, but was no longer trying to do anything outside of his commitment to MSI. He advised owners of MSI graphics cards to contact the company’s public relations department for technical issues.

In January 2023, the Taiwanese company MSI confirmed problems with payment to the MSI Afterburner developer in the Russian Federation due to sanctions. The Russian author of the Unwinder project does not blame the company for the situation. The partners expected to continue cooperation and tried to understand how to do it further. Nikolaychuk then announced on the Guru3D forum that the MSI Afterburner project has been mostly dead for 11 months now, as MSI for its part is not fulfilling its financial obligations to the developer of the license agreement due to sanctions and the current situation.

MSI then found a way to solve the financial problem in the framework of cooperation with Nikolaychuk, and the development of the MSI Afterburner project moved forward vigorously.

Previously, Nikolaychuk said on the Guru3D forum that he refused to monetize the project due to licensing, had the option of relocation, but is not going to do it, and also explained that he faced several unsuccessful attempts by MSI to continue cooperation.