Asus has showcased a new PCIe locking system on its upcoming Intel and AMD motherboards. The day of latch struggle may be over, as you now can remove your graphics card in seconds.
For time immemorial, PC users have been at the mercy of fiddly PCIe latches for every clean-up or upgrade. Such an annoying yet necessary evil that many choose to completely remove from their boards. This issue has only become more pronounced as the best graphics cards continue to grow in size, with even mid-range models taking up three slots. Thankfully, many manufacturers have noticed this problem and started implementing solutions.
Designs featuring Q-Release buttons at the edge of the board were a welcome step. This concept has proven so useful, in fact, that other manufacturers like MSI and Gigabyte have followed in Asus’ footsteps. Today, though, the latter company goes one step further with a system that forgoes buttons altogether.
Appearing first in some of its X870 and Z890 motherboards, Asus has crafted a graphics card release that’s simple and elegant. To use it, all you need to do is hold and pull the card from its left side, and it’ll come out without issue. As hardware reviewers frequently swapping GPUs in and out of boards, we thoroughly appreciated this. The only bummer is that this feature will likely debut on higher-end models before potentially moving down the stack.
Personally, I’d love to have such a feature on my TUF Gaming X670E Plus. Every time I remove the graphics card for cleaning, it’s a bit of a struggle. My Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse is such a chonker that it completely covers the PCIe latch from all sides. My CPU cooler makes this problem all the worse, leaving little room to shove a hand there. Due to this, I instead blast compressed air between the card’s cooler fins without removing it. It’s an imperfect but much easier solution.
This is to say nothing of this system’s potential to make building PCs altogether easier. PCIe latches aren’t the most obvious thing to explain to a new builder, making their removal all the more convenient for everyone involved.
