ASUS is some hot water with its new “PCIe Slot Q-Release Slim” mechanism on its new Intel 800 and AMD 800 series motherboards, damaging NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards.
Up until now, ASUS motherboards have had a nifty dedicated button users could press to release PCIe devices. But, ASUS removed this button from its latest-gen motherboards, making users pull the card out in a specific way: something you can see in the video above.
It’s not the best implementation, with the ASUS PCIe Slot Q-Release Slim mechanism being tested by users where a graphics card was released 60 times and the results weren’t good. In a post on X, leaker HXL shared a screenshot from a recent conversation on Chinese forums, with ASUS China General Manager, Tony Yu, saying that this issue will be addressed.
In a reply to that post on X, Andreas Schilling said he was “not happy with the solution either” and that he uses the ASUS Strix X870E-E Gaming motherboard for testing graphics card. He said: “so I have had to remove graphics cards from the slot a few dozen times. This didn’t always go smoothly and very often the card got stuck in the slot. First damage visible” on his GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card.
VideoCardz asked if the affected graphics card was the RTX 5090, to which he replied with a simple “yes”.
It would be nice to see ASUS provide the return of the physical button to its motherboards, especially with headline-grabbing issues like an RTX 5090 being damaged from its new PCIe Slot Q-Release Slim.