Removing a graphics card from a motherboard can be a pain. If the GPU is sizable, getting your fingers around the card to unlock the PCIe slot is no easy task.
With its latest motherboards, Asus has come up with a solution to this problem. The vendor adds a dedicated button to unlock the main PCIe slot that’s designed to be both unobstructed and easy to press.
The “PCIe Slot Q-Release” button arrives on select Z690 motherboards for Intel’s “Alder Lake” 12th generation Core CPUs, which the chip maker announced today. We briefly tried out the feature on the Asus ROG Strix Z690-E, where the button unlocks the main PCIe x16 slot.
At first glance, the system looks no different from any other PCIe slot. At the end of the groove is the dreaded tab that you’d normally press to unlock a graphics card from the slot. But oftentimes, the tab can be hard to reach when a graphics card is inserted over it.
To fix the issue, Asus has attached a steel wire from the PCIe tab to the Q-Release button. Hitting the button pulls the tab out of place, unlocking the PCIe slot.
The button is definitely easier to access. It also won't accidentally eject your graphics card from the motherboard and onto the floor. It's also pretty subtle. When we first pressed the button, we wondered if the PCIe slot had even unlocked the card only to realize it did.
Like other PCIe slots, the Q-release system is designed to automatically lock in a graphics card once it's inserted. Just don’t focus on the button when doing so. In our case, the graphics card didn’t firmly hold in place until we pushed the adjacent PCIe tab back into the locking position.
Overall, we're encouraged by the feature, especially since I myself recently spent close to an hour struggling to pull an Nvidia graphics card out of my PC. Stay tuned for our review of Asus’s latest Z690 motherboards, where we’ll dive into the button more, and discuss whether it should become a new standard.