Asus’ new Q-Launch Slim system for rapidly eradicating graphics playing cards is damaging graphics playing cards and different PCIe playing cards, in response to new studies. Q-Launch Slim is designed to be a better solution to take away PCIe units, similar to graphics playing cards, from Asus motherboards by eradicating the necessity to press a lock launch button – you simply pull the cardboard straight out – but it surely seems to be harming the playing cards within the course of. Nonetheless, Asus has been fast to reply, releasing an announcement taking part in down the severity of the scenario.
With Asus motherboards that includes the brand new fast card launch system now being out within the wild, studies are coming in of the brand new motherboards scratching the printed circuit board (PCB) when being disconnected. That is understandably a serious concern for any graphics card consumer, however particularly these seeking to purchase one of many new greatest graphics card choices such because the $2,000 RTX 5090. That’s if you happen to handle to work out the place to purchase an RTX 5090, in fact.
A video, proven beneath, demonstrates the difficulty, with this consumer regularly slotting in then eradicating the cardboard and it clearly displaying indicators of scratches and injury after just some of those cycles. The within of the quick-release system has steel grips to help the cardboard, which is suspected to be the explanation for the scratches.
In the meantime, one of many complaints comes from Andreas Schilling, the editor of HardwareLuxx. In a submit on X (previously Twitter), he stated that after eradicating the cardboard “a couple of dozen occasions”, it might “fairly often” get caught within the PCIe slot. He additionally connected a picture of a small chip close to the connector of the PCB.
Chinese language customers have additionally proven injury in an identical spot. The submit gained sufficient traction to summon Asus’ Chinese language common supervisor, Tony Yu, saying that he’d attain out to resolve the difficulty.
Nonetheless, Asus has reacted rapidly to those preliminary studies. In a press launch, the corporate states that “the brand new design performs equally to conventional PCIe slots, leaving solely utilization marks beneath regular utilization frequency.”
The corporate goes on to say that, “in our inside testing and analysis of the extraordinarily small variety of circumstances reported, we discovered no injury to the motherboard or graphics card that might have an effect on performance and/or efficiency.” It additionally factors out that “any kind of PCIe add-in card will exhibit indicators of utilization and put on marking after 60 steady insertions and removals.”
This isn’t essentially the most complete denial of the issue, as whereas it’s true that almost all customers don’t repeatedly insert and take away graphics playing cards that always, there actually are situations the place a motherboard is perhaps used for a whole bunch of graphics card swaps – similar to in our personal graphics card check techniques.
As to the right methodology of insertion and removing, Asus’ directions present the consumer inserting a GPU at a 2-degree angle, from again to entrance. Should you plan on choosing up one in every of Asus’ new quick-release gaming motherboards, you may wish to take into account following its directions fastidiously.
Asus has additionally introduced the pricing for its liquid-cooled RTX 5090, which is available in at $1,000 costlier than Nvidia’s pricing for its flagship RTX 5000 graphics card.
