Some Asus Z690 motherboards get a button to easily unlock PCIe slot

About ruddy time, extracting a GPU from some boards is a bloody nightmare (the ones with a tab at the bottom)

 

yeah, cause we swap cards every day.
lol when i cant use a pencil anymore to remove it, i will stop building rigs, instead of buying this ..

 

Nice idea. Removing a GPU is often more tricky than it needs to be.

 

This should have been a standard by 2008 when the GTX 280s, 8800GTX Ultras, HD 3870x2 etc came out.

It can be a real pain releasing that tab.
Ive seen so many boards with that broken off in the used market.

 

Tbh. I do swear when I remove a fat beefy card, but not swapping cards often enough for it to be an issue.
Also got my doubts about such button to be a good idea, not knowing the full design but I suspect it will introduce another point of weakness.
I rather saw that all motherboards came with a way more useful feature like anti-sag support, since obviously most manufacturers seem to be unable to design graphic cards properly to avoid it to begin with.

 

That button is going to be needed for people with large video cards and using backplate active cooling.
It looks like the OLED / M.2 heatsinks on these boards are right next to the X16 slot, which may be one of the reasons for this.

If you look at the Maximus 12 Extreme, there was a x1 PCIE slot between the video card and the CPU area, which made active backplate cooling of cards impossible if you were using a x1 soundcard.
On the Maximus 13 Extreme/Apex boards (the Glacial boards kept the old layout), they moved the x1 slot back towards the second PCIE x16 slot, which meant you could use active backplate cooling without the soundcard blocking it. But the first x16 had to be moved up towards the OLED/m.2 heatesink where there was no space to access the lever.

I actually complained to Asus directly about difficulty accessing the lever without a very thin shim on the Z590 Maximus 13 Extreme before release (when writing my OC guide for ROG forums).

Looks like they listened.

 

Good to know. I thought I was going crazy lol. I have built many systems in my younger years built a few new rigs for myself and friends/family and notice things are getting "tighter". They need to work on the sagging issue. I have a 450 Tomahawk with a RX580 and boy there is some sagging going on!

 

@Mineria
i dont really see a problem for ppl like here on guru.
cards are being throttled the most by temps. and ignoring open bench case or vacuum cleaner like fans,
water is the way to go.
nice side effect, card is less than 2 slots thick, no prob to reach the lever

but even when using aircoolers, while annoying, but not anywhere close to the point where I'm willing to limit selection (brand etc) or higher cost...