Back in 2007 I built myself a gaming PC with two brand new GTX 8800 cards (SLI, baby!) and nearly cooked/choked them to death in first week of operation. What I learned back then was that nVidia drivers did not create a proper fan curve that would ramp up with rising temperatures and that I needed a piece of 3rd party software named Afterburner to keep my system cooled.
It's been nearly 20 years and probably a dozen different graphic card models since then. I have just finished installing a render box for my wife with a 3090 in it. Installed the drivers. Installed the Afterburner. Tuned it.
Then it dawned on me: Is this still a necessary step? What would happen if I did not install Afterburner? Don't nVidia drivers control the fans properly?
Logic dictates it would be crazy for the official drivers not to keep the card cool, but I've been doing it one way for so long that I am too afraid to experiment (risking hardware damage?).
When you're afraid to let evidence lead you, next best thing is surely asking strangers on the internet - so here it goes: Is MSI Afterburner necessary? What would happen if I don't install it? Do YOU have it installed?
It is not the drivers that dictate the fan but the GPU bios. So how the card behaves depends on how the manufacturer tuned it which is to say, these days it'll work fine. Many "high end" cards usually have a bios switch for silent or turbo mode so whatever.
Back when I had a 1080ti, I used afterburner to set my own fan curve. And now with my rx6900xt I use AMD's adrenaline because it actually works great for many things including setting a custom fan curve . I've heard Nvidia's first party software was a bit of a mess for oc stuff so that's why Afterburner became so popular but I never installed anything past Nvidia's drivers so maybe it's good now, who knows.
Does Nvidia have first party software for OC, fan curve, undervolt and OSD?
That's what I use Afterburner currently for.
I'm not sure. Like I said, I never installed more than just the drivers from them when I had a Nvidia GPU. Just heard that whatever software they had wasn't great.