PSA - MSI's Dragon Centre and your GPU performance

[LPoint]

This is a heads up for anyone thinking of downloading Dragon Centre in order to control their RGB on an MSI board, or for anyone that has already done so and is perhaps experience problems with their new GPU.

I built my first ever pc (MSI b550-a pro, Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC, Ryzen 5800x), everything went fine, until the next day when I tried to run some benchmarks. I ran heaven first and got constant black screens and artifacts. Then, I tried 3DMark Timespy, and again constant artifacts. Same issues in my games and even on my desktop at idle.

I spent the next few days trying to figure out the problem, RMA'd my card, had a new one, same issue. tested my ram, all fine. Changed power supply, still not working.

Then I stumbled across a forum post about Dragon Centre and why you shouldn't install it due to how intrusive it is - it's essentially a piece of bloatware with some lighting control tagged on and it messes with your CPU, GPU, RAM, who knows what else.

Anyway, long story short, after days of troubleshooting and thinking I had made some major mistake in my build, I completely removed every trace of Dragon Centre and, low and behold, everything is working just fine. I have run Heaven and Timespy 3 times each and not 1 hiccup - no black screens, no artifacts, nothing. Games run fine.

I cannot believe a piece of software from a company as big as MSI could be so intrusive and cause such issues for the user. I'm just glad I managed to fix it.

N.B. my RGB lighting has remained as it was set, even after shut down, so if you really want to set your lighting up, I would install dragon centre, set your lighting up, then get rid of every trace of that garbage software and never look back.

TLDR; Do not install Dragon Centre. If you have it installed, remove it.

 

[LPoint]

no issues here, I use it mainly to set my CPU fan curves

From what I've read, you may not necessarily notice anything wrong, but, specifically with Ryzen systems, it gains access to your CPU and can create instability by changing core clocks without any user intervention. Do what you want with your system, but I would strongly advise you to research it and see for yourself what it does, assuming you haven't already.

After the issues it caused me, I'll be avoiding MSI at all costs for any future builds/upgrades.

Edit: just seen that it also can mess with your RAM timings. No software should be able to do such things without the user knowing. Honestly disgraceful.

 

[LPoint]

when you remove it, be sure to run every uninstall.exe that there is for dragon centre and remove all of the SDKs, then once you've done so you may need to go back into Bios and reapply XMP on RAM and check your CPUs settings also, it changed them both on my PC.