Motherboard Makers Finally Figure Out How To Solve GPU Removal Headaches

If you've ever rebuilt a PC, you know the struggle: the GPU is locked in the slot, and you can't get your fat adult fingers down next to the oversized CPU cooler you installed to press the retention lever down. In the words of many classic infomercials, "there has to be a better way!" Some motherboard manufacturers already had various solutions for this struggle, but easily the best we've seen is coming soon from ASUS.

The company hasn't made any proclamations or even blog posts about this mechanism. Instead, we actually peeped the new-style lock in a video from the Gamescom floor posted by German overclocking and cooling expert der8auer. Many hardware companies are on location in Cologne showing off their new and upcoming hardware, and the Thermal Grizzly bossman met up with ASUS to check out their upcoming products.


You should hit the video if you're curious about all of ASUS' upcoming hardware, but we were most interested in a particular gimmick on this ROG CROSSHAIR X870E HERO motherboard. It's difficult to show in a picture, but essentially, rather than the button-style quick-release GPU slot we've seen before, ASUS has engineered a new GPU-slot retention mechanism apparently called "PCIe Q-Release Slim" that automatically un-latches when the GPU is pulled from the back end, where the I/O cluster is.

This makes a lot of sense—it won't be possible to lift GPUs in a case from that side, as they'll be screwed down, yet for testing on a test bench it allows tuners, tweakers, and reviewers like ourselves to rapidly remove graphics cards from the system and swap them out. Honestly, this might be more exciting than any of the other new features coming with the X870/E chipsets.


Admittedly, though, most builders probably aren't swapping graphics cards that often, so a different feature might be more exciting. We're also quite fond of the quick-removal latches that are showing up on M.2 sockets now, as well. There's one on the aforementioned ROG Crosshair board, but MSI's is arguably even simpler.

Once again, it's difficult to show in a photo, so you should check the video if you're curious to see it in motion, but essentially, it looks like MSI's upcoming Z890-chipset motherboards for Intel's Arrow Lake processors will include a quick-release latch for the M.2 heatsink. We haven't tried it ourselves, but you can see MSI's Michiel Berkhout pop off the M.2 heatsink simply by squeezing a latch on the end. It looks quite convenient for folks who need to swap storage frequently.

As DIY PC building falls more and more into the exclusive realm of the enthusiast, features like these are likely to become more popular, because a larger portion of PC builders are folks who probably enjoy the act of building as much as they enjoy using the machine itself. For our part, we're all for it. Hopefully other manufacturers follow suit.