Nvidia’s latest driver update breaks mVolt+ overclocking functionality — Nifty, open-source app allowed users to increase the power limit to 700W on their RTX 50-series GPUs without hardware mods

Nvidia’s current-gen Blackwell family includes some of the best graphics cards on the market with exceptional performance, but pushing silicon to its limit can always unlock more power. This is where enthusiast software, such as mVolt+, comes in, allowing users to overclock their GPUs beyond what’s usually permissible. Unfortunately, it seems like a new driver update has shut down mVolt+ across all RTX 50-series cards.

Unlike mainstream GPU utilities like MSI Afterburner, mVolt+ bypasses standard driver restrictions and gives you more granular control over a few hardware blocks. The app can tweak separate power targets for the core and memory channels. It can also provide access to voltage and clock offsets for Core, XBAR, SYS, and VRAM. You can manually tune the power across the interconnect and video encoders, for instance, instead of relying on a global slider.

As such, users have been able to nudge their hardware into territory usually only charted by relying on a specialized VBIOS or physically modding the PCB. Last week, an Asus ROG Astra RTX 5080 reached 680W using mVolt+ despite even the official OC BIOS only permitting a 450W TDP. Someone with an RTX 5090 saw their GPU draw 650-700W of power while gaming, compared to 450W it used to suck up previously.

Even though the performance gains were marginal in real-world usage, mVolt+ was still a useful tool for overclocking. It allowed enthusiasts to chart on 3DMark’s worldwide rankings just through software, so the fact it has suddenly stopped working is quite disappointing. The latest driver, version 615.56, seems to be blocking the app from making changes, hard crashing anytime you try to adjust the core power limit.

It’s unclear if this is an intentional move from Nvidia, or just a compatibility issue that’s preventing mVolt+ from properly working on the latest drivers. Some users on the Overclock.net RTX 5090 thread say their GPUs are still able to accept power limit modifications through Hydra 2.3B Pro — another extreme overclocking utility. That suggests mVolt+ wasn’t explicitly blocked, and that its creator b00nz can push an update to patch this driver conflict soon.