Right here’s a quickie however a goodie I needed to move on. On the Asus sales space at CES 2024, I witnessed a easy, but gorgeous motherboard innovation that, looking back, I’m shocked I’ve by no means seen earlier than.
It’s all about ensuring your PC’s RAM is correctly seated. As veteran PC builders little doubt know — and new PC builders little doubt curse — improperly seated reminiscence kits could cause all types of pesky points and could be very tough to note within the second. Worse, relying on the kind of CPU cooler you’re utilizing, attending to your put in RAM to verify if it’s correctly inserted generally is a huge headache whereas troubleshooting.
Asus PR supervisor Juan Jose Guerrero instructed me that most of the assist calls the corporate receives could be traced again to this singular annoying problem. So within the firm’s new Z790 motherboards, Asus determined to deal with it head-on.
Brad Chacos/IDG
See the tiny orange LED indicator mild subsequent to the DIMM slots on the board? That detects when there are reminiscence modules inserted into your slots, and in the event that they aren’t absolutely inserted, the sunshine stays on. In the event that they’re peachy-keen, the LED is disabled so you may inform at a look that every thing’s cool. (For those who’re inserting a dual-channel reminiscence equipment right into a quad-channel construct, it keys off the 2 main DIMM slots.)
I’d have saved hours of my life and ounces of blood disassembling previous DIY adventures if this now-no-brainer function was accessible earlier than. Once more: How has no one considered this? Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose.
As soon as your RAM is in and your PC is booted, the identical mild additionally signifies that your GPU, RAM, graphics card, and storage are all working correctly throughout startup. That tiny LED is an actual champ! And it pairs properly with different Asus quality-of-life options like a PCIe quick-release button and a “Q-Latch” that secures M.2 SSDs with out using extra instruments.
They’re all present in each Asus Z790 refresh ROG and TUF motherboard introduced since final Computex. It’s my first time seeing it in motion and I simply needed to shout it out.
Keep tuned to PCWorld for extra PC goodness from the CES 2024 present ground all week lengthy!
