YAMDCC - Yet Another MSI (Dragon) Center Clone

A fast, lightweight MSI Center alternative and fan control utility for MSI laptops.

Please read the whole README (or at least the Supported Laptops and FAQ sections) before downloading.

Important

Windows has recently begun flagging WinRing0 (the driver YAMDCC uses for EC access) as malware. See this discussion for more information.

This is planned to be fixed in v2.0 of YAMDCC by removing the need for WinRing0.

Table of contents (click to expand)

• Disclaimers
• Features
• Screenshots
• Supported laptops
  • Community-tested laptops
• Comparison
• Roadmap
• Download
• Compile
• Issues
• Contributing
• FAQ
• License and copyright
• Third-party libraries

Disclaimers

• This program requires low-level access to some of your computer hardware to apply settings. While no issues should arise from this, I (Sparronator9999) and any other contributers shall not be held responsible if this program fries your computer.
• Additionally, if you do something silly with the program like turn off all your fans while running under full load, we will not be held responsible for any damage you cause to your own hardware from your use of this program.
• Linux is not yet supported. Please don't beg me for Linux support, it will come when I can be bothered (and when I figure out how to run background services/daemons on Linux).
• This program, repository and its authors are not affiliated with Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. in any way, shape, or form.

Features

• Fan control: Change the fan profiles for your CPU and GPU fans, including fan speeds, temperature thresholds, and Full Blast (a.k.a. Cooler Boost in MSI Center). This allows you to fix a fan profile that isn't aggressive enough under full load, turn your fans off when your computer is idle, or just give them a boost during CPU-heavy tasks.
• Performance mode: MSI laptops have their own performance mode setting (not to be confused with Windows' built-in power plans). You can change it here.
• Charging threshold: This program can limit how much your laptop's battery charges to, which can help reduce battery degradation, especially if you leave your laptop plugged in all the time.
• Lightweight: YAMDCC takes up less than ten megabytes of disk space when installed, and is designed to be light on your laptop's CPU.
• Configurable: Almost all settings (including those not accessible through the config editor) can be changed with the power of XML.

Screenshots

More screenshots (click to expand)

Supported Laptops

Currently, there are configs for the following laptops:

• MSI Alpha 17 C7VF (thanks @SethCodingInc)
• MSI Bravo 15 B7ED (thanks @VisionCrizzal)
• MSI Bravo 17 C7VE (thanks @advait404)
• MSI Crosshair 17 B12UGZ (thanks @ios7jbpro)
• MSI GF63 Thin 11SC
• MSI Katana GF66 12UG (thanks @porkmanager)
• MSI Modern 15 A5M (thanks @tedomi2705)
• MSI Stealth 15M A11SDK (thanks @l1ngu)
• MSI Stealth GS76 11UG (thanks @gemSquared)
• MSI Titan GT77HX 13VH (thanks @noteMASTER11)
• MSI Vector 16 HX A14VHG (thanks @KamykJr)
• MSI Vector 16 HX AI A2XWIG (thanks @Peter42R)

There are also generic configs that should work with most MSI laptops, but with an incorrect default config. You can use the EC-to-config feature to get the proper fan profiles for your laptop. This will be made the default behaviour in a future version of YAMDCC.

Other laptop brands are not supported. You're probably looking for NoteBook FanControl instead.

Community-tested laptops

The following laptops have been tested by the community and are confirmed to be working, but don't have their own public YAMDCC configs. A suggested generic config is provided below:

• MSI Raider GE66 12UGS (thanks @grimy400): MSI-10th-gen-or-newer-dualfan.xml
• MSI Vector 17 HX A14VHG (thanks @injitools): MSI-10th-gen-or-newer-dualfan-nokeylight.xml
• MSI Vector GP78 HX 13V (thanks @Twisted6 and @TheSingular): MSI-10th-gen-or-newer-dualfan-nokeylight.xml

To test your laptop, go to the config tutorial wiki page and follow the instructions to get a config for your laptop.

Comparison

Feature	MSI Center	YAMDCC
Installed size¹	~950 MB	~5.9 MB
Fan control	✔	✔
Temp. threshold control	❌	✔
Multi-fan profile support	❌	✔
Charge limit setting	Limited²	✔
Perf. mode setting	✔	✔
Win/Fn key swap	✔	✔³
Win key disable	✔	❌
Keyboard backlight adjustment	❌	✔⁴
Hardware monitoring	✔	Limited⁵
Other MSI Center features	✔	❌
Open source	❌	✔

1: As of v2.0.38, MSI Center takes about 950 MB of storage space when counting the UWP app (749 MB) and the files installed on first launch to C:\Program Files (x86)\MSI (205 MB). YAMDCC's installed size is based on the Release build of v1.2 when installed normally (plus uninstaller) with all components selected (the default).

2: MSI Center only supports setting the charge limit to 60%, 80%, 100%, or auto-select based on usage. YAMDCC can set the charge limit to anything between 0 and 100% (with 0 meaning charge to 100% always), but not auto-select based on usage.

3: Not supported by older MSI laptops under YAMDCC. Not sure about MSI Center, however.

4: Not supported by laptops without a keyboard backlight (obviously), or by any laptop with an RGB keyboard backlight.

5: YAMDCC only supports monitoring the CPU/GPU temperatures and fan speeds via EC.

Roadmap

v2.0

• Re-write config system
  • YAMDCC was originally written to allow anyone to add support for their own laptop brands (by changing which and how many EC registers are written), however since then it has added many features specific to MSI laptops.
  • The new config system would simplify configs by removing register configs and only storing user settings (custom fan profiles, charge threshold, etc.)
  • Old configs would most likely be incompatible, but can be easily migrated to v2.0, possibly via a migrator app/script.
  • Since there are two main EC generations for MSI laptops, the user can be asked when their laptop was released until detection is implemeted (see next feature).
• Switch to WMI for EC access
  • An msi-ec developer has reached out to me with more information.
  • This would resolve the reliability issues with attempting to access the EC separately from the OS (which probably uses WMI under the hood).
  • This could also make laptop EC generation detection possible, eliminating the need to ask the user when their laptop was released.
  • YAMDCC can also stop relying on WinRing0 for most features (I have been told by an msi-ec developer that "gen 1" ECs may still require a kernel driver for some features, however).
• Support for keyboard mic/speaker mute LEDs
  • Apparently this isn't handled by hardware/Windows, but after reverse-engineering Apple's Boot Camp to get keyboard shortcuts working without its original Boot Camp Manager app (drivers are still required), I really shouldn't be surprised anymore.
  • If you have information on how these work, please comment on this issue.
    • I am already aware of BeardOverflow's Linux EC driver for MSI laptops, and will look to this first.

Future releases

Below are some planned features for potential future releases:

• Plugin system for additional optional features (needs research)
• GPU switch support
  • Research for this feature has stalled. Since my laptop doesn't appear to support this feature, this may be removed from the planned features in the future unless someone else figures out how to control the GPU switch without MSI Center/Feature Manager.
  • Comment on this issue if you know how to get this working without MSI Center.
• .NET support
  • Mandatory for Linux support
  • The GUI should compile on .NET 8 (and in fact has been compiled on .NET 8 before).
  • The Windows service on the other hand... is going to be interesting. Even with the Microsoft.Windows.Compatibility package installed, I still wasn't able to get the service to run without issues.
• Linux support (not guaranteed)
  • Now this would require some figuring out, and may end up being a seperate project that's compatible with this project's configs.

Download

Beta builds are available from GitHub releases.

Development builds are available through GitHub Actions.

If you don't have a GitHub account, you can also download the latest development build from nightly.link.

You're probably looking for the Release build, unless you're debugging issues with the program.

Alternatively, you can build the program yourself.

Compile

See also the wiki page.

Using Visual Studio

1. Install Visual Studio 2022 with the .NET Desktop Development workload checked.
2. Download the code repository, or clone it with git.
3. Extract the downloaded code, if needed.
4. Open YAMDCC.sln in Visual Studio.
5. Click Build > Build Solution to build everything.
6. Your output, assuming default build settings, is located in YAMDCC.ConfigEditor\bin\Debug\net48\.
7. ???
8. Profit!

Make sure to only use matching yamdccsvc.exe and ConfigEditor.exe/yamdcc.exe together, otherwise you may encounter issues (that means net stop yamdccsvc first, then compile).

From the command line

1. Follow steps 1-3 above to install Visual Studio and download the code.
2. Open Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022 and cd to your project directory.
3. Run msbuild /t:restore to restore the solution, including NuGet packages.
4. Run msbuild YAMDCC.sln /p:platform="Any CPU" /p:configuration="Debug" to build the project, substituting Debug with Release if you want a release build instead.
5. Your output should be located in YAMDCC.ConfigEditor\bin\Debug\net48\, assuming you built with the above unmodified command.
6. ???
7. Profit!

Issues

If your question isn't already answered in the FAQ or issues megathread, and there isn't already another similar issue in the issue tracker, feel free to open an issue. Please make sure to use the correct issue template for your problem.

Contributing

See the compile instructions to build this project.

If you would like to contribute to the project with bug fixes, new features, or new configs, feel free to open a pull request. Please include the following:

• Bug fixes/improvements/new feature: Describe the changes you made and why they are important or useful.
• New config: Add a config with your laptop's default fan profile so that other people don't have to run the EC-to-config tool.

FAQ

This section has been moved to the wiki.

License and Copyright

Copyright © 2023-2025 Sparronator9999.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Third-party Libraries

This project makes use of the following third-party libraries:

• Json.NET (Newtonsoft.Json) to parse obtained release manifests from GitHub.
• Marked .NET to parse release changelogs.
• My fork of Named Pipe Wrapper for communication between the service and UI program (called YAMDCC.IPC in the source files).
  • MessagePack for safe(r) message serialisation than .NET's obsolete BinaryFormatter.
• Task Scheduler Managed Wrapper to schedule automatic update checks.
• WinRing0 for low-level hardware access required to read/write the EC.

Special thanks

• The r/MSILaptops subreddit for thinking YAMDCC is good enough to deserve a pinned post.
• @porkmanager for basically being my personal bug bounty hunter.
• Everyone who has starred this project
  • Unfortunately, the star history graphic isn't working for some reason (as of writing)...