Here’s a quickie however a goodie I needed to move on. At 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 may 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 test if it’s correctly inserted is usually a large headache whereas troubleshooting.

Asus PR supervisor Juan Jose Guerrero informed me that most of the help calls the corporate receives could be traced again to this singular annoying difficulty. 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 totally inserted, the sunshine stays on. If they’re peachy-keen, the LED is disabled so you possibly can inform at a look that the whole lot’s cool. (If you’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 characteristic was accessible earlier than. Again: How has no person considered this? Hindsight is 20/20 I assume.

Once 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 further 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.

Stay tuned to PCWorld for extra PC goodness from the CES 2024 present ground all week lengthy!