Unwinder, the man who keeps Afterburner ticking, revealed he’s received future MSI RTX 50 boards featuring “Unlocked Extended Voltage Control.” These cards will allow beta versions of Afterburner to expose a whole new bag of knobs and dials for anyone mad enough to push them.

Posting on the Guru3D forums, Unwinder wrote: “We've got first working samples of future MSI 50x0 graphics cards with unlocked extended voltage control and currently testing new beta with it.” He added that the new firmware will also unlock VRM temperature monitoring through the MP29816A sensor.

The trick lies in MSI working with Nvidia to open up MP2988 and MP29816A PWM controllers. These controllers exist on reference RTX 5080 and 5090 boards but are locked down by Nvidia’s restrictions, meaning vanilla cards are stuck with the anaemic GPU boost voltage slider.

MSI’s “Extreme OC” design will bin that and let you tinker with triple-channel voltage control across the core, memory and auxiliary rails, with a ±100mV range instead of the miserly 0–20mV available on reference models.

Sadly, anyone hoping to fry their reference RTX 5090 won’t be able to, as Nvidia still refuses to let punters near the locked controllers on standard boards. MSI’s new toys will only work on its custom “Extreme OC” cards.

Speculation points to these boards reviving MSI’s Lightning brand, which hasn’t been seen since the RTX 2080 Ti Lightning OC. The company shifted to its SUPRIM cards as the flagship afterwards, but the combination of yellow accents, black fans and ridiculous overclocking features suggests Lightning is about to strike again.