MSI Afterburner vs smartmontools

MSI Afterburner is Windows software for tuning graphics cards and monitoring hardware in real time. Its controls cover GPU clock frequency, voltage, power limits and fan speed, and users can set fan curves and save tuning profiles. MSI says it works with graphics cards from all brands, not only its own. OC Scanner can find the highest stable overclock settings for a card. While gaming, an on-screen display can show live system performance information. The page also describes Predator, a separate recording tool for games or overclocking that supports H.264, WMV and AVI formats. MSI lists a free plan at free, with overclocking and undervolting, hardware monitoring, custom fan control and an on-screen display. There is no free trial. MSI lists versions 4.6.6 (Final) and 4.6.7 (Beta), both released in September 2026. It warns that phishing sites may steal data and identifies msi.com and Guru3D as the correct sites.

smartmontools is a free package containing smartctl and smartd for controlling and monitoring storage devices through SMART. It supports ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS, and NVMe disks, as well as SCSI/SAS tape devices. smartctl can report SMART health status, show capabilities such as error logging and offline surface scanning, display vendor-specific attributes, start device self-tests, and read their logs. A failing health status can mean a device has failed or predicts failure within 24 hours. smartd periodically monitors SMART status, error and self-test logs, and attribute changes; it can schedule tests and report errors and attribute changes to syslog. It also supports warning emails and executable commands. The project says it should run on modern Linux, BSD variants, macOS, Solaris, Windows, Cygwin, OS/2, eComStation, and QNX systems, and can run from various Live CDs and DVDs. The package uses the GNU GPL Version 2 license and was originally derived from the Linux smartsuite package. Its capabilities focus on SMART health reporting, testing, and ongoing monitoring.