Asus has come up with an ingenious way of potentially saving the life of your graphics card and even your whole PC. Thanks to an accelerometer built into its ROG Astral graphics card, it can tell you if your GPU is sagging and potentially set to come crashing down on the rest of your PC, or at the very least damage its own PCIe connector.
The new Asus addition is built into its flagship ROG Astral version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. While our RTX 5090 review showed the Founders Edition of the card to be surprisingly compact, many of the best graphics cards, including the ROG Astral, are far larger and heavier, and this has the potential to wreak havoc inside your PC.
The issue is that while your graphics card is held in place by its PCIe slot and the IO bracket at the back of your case, these were never really designed to support the huge size and weight of some graphics cards. The ROG Astral, for instance, weighs 3kg (8.8lbs).
Even if held securely by the rear IO bracket, all that weight can cause the card itself to sag or bend and put a great deal of force on the PCIe bracket. For a while now, we’ve seen makers of the best gaming motherboard options incorporate reinforced PCIe slots, while many of the PC cases include graphics card support brackets. Meanwhile, many users simply choose to prop up the end of their graphics card, with all manner of weird and wacky GPU props, such as in this Star Wars PC.
Asus’ new support system helps to ensure that you’ve both installed your graphics card properly, without initial sag (that hints at the card being insufficiently supported), and that you’re kept informed of any movement that could suggest your graphics card prop has slipped or your IO bracket screws have loosened. It uses an in-built Bosch Sensortec BMI323 inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor to detect when the card is anything other than perfectly level. The card integrates with Asus’ GPU Tweak software to report the sag or lack thereof, alerting you to changes.
The feature has actually been built into the card since it launched a few months ago, but has only just been enabled via a recent update. The new feature is called Equipment Installation Check, and it was spotted initially by Reddit users, then tested by Chinese site Uniko’s Hardware.
The software shows the angle of the card in degrees and lets you set up an alert if the card dips beyond a certain level, with the check taking place on system startup.
It’s certainly a novel way to help ensure your system stays as healthy as possible for as long as possible, and certainly given the extreme $3,359.99 price of the ROG Astral RTX 5090, it’s one way to feel like you’re getting just a touch more value from your expensive graphics card.
Of course, alternatively, you could just mount your graphics card vertically and avoid the issue altogether, as long as it’s not right next to a solid glass panel. You can check out our best PC case guide to find some cases, such as Hyte Y70 Touch, which make it easy to mount your graphics card in the least self-destructive way.
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