MSI Afterburner and some PSUs can now pull an emergency power brake to prevent your graphics card going up in a puff of smoke

If you've kept up with hardware news in recent years, you'll likely have seen reports of graphics card power connectors melting or similar. It happens enough as to be noteworthy, and led to a redesign for the connector itself, 12VHPWR. It's also led to companies building out their own countermeasures, including a new one baked into the latest version of MSI Afterburner.

The latest version of Afterburner, developed by Unwinder, incorporates a new feature that will warn a user when a power supply is showing signs of abnormal load or instability. Using a new PSU.dll plugin, Afterburner now supports new power supply reporting functionalities:

"New plugin provides traditional PSU 12V/5V/3.3V voltages, currents, output power, efficiency, temperature and fan speed monitoring functionality on MSI MEG Ai1x00 series power supplies and additional per-pin current monitoring for 12VHPWR/12V-2x6 connectors on new MSI MPG Ai1x00TS power supplies.

"When you set critical threshold for such sensor, you may see alarms from 12VHPWR/12V-2x6 overcurrent or current imbalance in monitoring window, in On-Screen Display, enable sound alarm, load some specific emergency MSI Afterburner profile (e.g. a profile with drastically lowered power limit), perform emergency system shutdown and so on," the 4.6.7 beta notes say.

Afterburner support also offers the ability for a system to set an emergency power brake, knocking 25% off the total power limit when an emergency occurs to prevent damage to the card, or worse, an electrical fault that causes physical damage to the card, power supply or more.

This feature currently only works with select MSI PSUs, however. The forthcoming MSI MPG Ai1x00TS range—which I've not seen on sale anywhere yet—feature the prerequisite GPU Safeguard+ feature.

Other non-MPG PSUs, such as the MSI MEG Ai1x00 range, support GPU Safeguard (without the plus) and some real-time monitoring features in Afterburner. Though not the per-pin current monitoring.

GPU Safeguard+ was announced back at CES 2026. It involves hardware and software monitoring and protections for faults, alerting a user when something crops up.

If a fault occurs, a buzzer on the power supply sounds. Upon hearing this, a user is meant to shutdown their PC, though if it happens when they're not around, a black screen will be thrown up to try and prevent a continued load from doing damage to components. MSI Center is also able to throw out an error message, as is Afterburner with this update.

These PSUs also offer a low-level anti-melt mitigation (if you want to be grandiose about it), and one that I've found pretty handy on a couple of builds. The connector itself is painted yellow, so it's easier to spot when it's not quite fully seated. Slightly loose connectors are often blamed for melted cards, though notably not in all cases, and MSI suggests this dual-colour connector is enough in itself to prevent a good deal of issues.

"While our dual-color connectors have mostly addressed issues caused by loose connections, we wanted to do a bit more to address the other factors that can contribute to this overheating," MSI says.

These measures go a good way to ensuring peace of mind with a high-wattage graphics card inside a system. Though you have to wonder, why is this something that the consumer has to be worried about to begin with? Graphics cards are more demanding than ever, with wattages easily in excess of 300 W for some cards, but does that necessitate a higher risk of malfunction, or does the power solution just need to be more robust to begin with?

Other companies have solutions for the same problem: Asus has a chunky power connector for its BTF cards that does away with the need for a cable entirely, and ASRock's PSUs include sensors and dual-colour connectors to lower the chance of anything bad happened. Whatever the case, paying for new kit for peace of mind doesn't feel like a long-term solution to a problem, especially as graphics cards aren't cheap themselves.