MSI Afterburner adds 16-pin power connector warning for its MPG AI PSUs — new update could save your expensive GPU from melting

Last month, MSI unveiled its new power supplies at CES 2026 that included two models with GPU Safeguard+, a new feature that pops up a warning on your computer if there's something wrong with your GPU. Specifically, it's trying to protect high-power cards like the RTX 5080 and 5090 from their incendiary nature. Today, MSI has released a new update for Afterburner that finally brings this feature to the public.

The update in question is version 4.6.7, which is in beta currently, and can be downloaded from MSI's official Afterburner website. As you can see in the screenshot above, once installed, the software will throw a warning message at you if it detects a fault in the 16-pin connection. The infamously fragile nature of the 12V-2x6 connector (or 12VHPWR) has been documented for years at this point, so this is just the latest entrant in the ever-growing list of hopeful countermeasures.

GPU Safeguard+ only works on the new MPG Ai1300TS and MPG Ai1600TS power supplies; the cheaper MAG A1200PLS and MAG A1000PLS models have the basic non-plus GPU Safeguard, which doesn't have the pop-up capability synced with Afterburner. They'll still sound an audible alarm because the underlying active monitoring system is the same across all four units. Either PSU will lower the card's power limit to 75% to prevent overheating — or worse — by loading a predefined emergency profile automatically.

This will happen on both Nvidia and AMD GPUs with the 16-pin connector, thanks to the new PSU.dll monitoring plugin that plugs into these smart PSUs. It will read telemetry data pertaining to voltage and temperatures coming from the power supply and communicate with Afterburner to keep everything in check. Alongside this new feature, MSI Afterburner's latest update also adds support for the company's RTX 5090 LIGHTNING series GPUs aimed at extreme overclocking.

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