So I've been doing some testing and found a potential design fault or maybe a design oversight with PCI-E slots, More specifically the pins inside the slots.

Let me explain, I have 2 rigs n my house, Both running Asus motherboards, 1 is mine the other is my flat mates, 1 x with an MSI 1080 Ti Gaming X and the other with an Asus GTX 1080 Ti Strix, Both have slight GPU sag as is normal with beefy heatsink equipped cards.

I decided to unscrew the PCI-E slot screws, Push the cards up a tiny bit and then screw them tightly in place, In doing so I found a little design flaw of PCIE slots.

Upon booting into Windows I noticed that games were drastically slower, I checked GPU-Z and noticed on both systems the speed of the cards topped out at X1 speed instead of the standard X16 speed, So I undid my little DIY GPU sag fix of pushing them up and left them in their normal orientation, Rebooted and back to X16.

So from that I can see that a number of the pins inside the PCIE slot lose connection with the card, Forcing it down to X1 speed, Maybe Asus in their future motherboards can equip the PCI-E lanes with pins that protrude more so when people do want to fix GPU sag the pins won't lose contact with the card.

Just food for thought 😮