Can a motherboard short out if the side of the plate is in contact with the ventilated brackets of the case?

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Jak_Sparra

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Hello,

top marks for posting a picture by the way.

Well I had to look in my case and I have one bracket that's not fitted at the bottom properly so it's touching the board and I have no problems. Other than that the rest of the mother board is not touching the back of the tower.
Your motherboard should not be effected by it touching the case as that would mean there would be an electric current running through the case and that is very serious as you could get electrocuted. BUT, by design it should be impossible to do unless you have done some weird DIY electrical work. You see the whole things should be earthed by the power supply unit (PSU).

The only thing I can think of is that the case is either manufactured incorrectly or those plates are thicker than normal (maybe due to excess paint finish) and this is casing the motherboard to be under some sort of lateral pressure and maybe slightly flexing when warming up. This in turn can cause microscopic fractures in the circuitry which can case problems.

What is the problem you are having with the PCI-E slot?

Another guess would be if the case is not a great fit with the motherboard (although I've not heard of it happening before) if you have had to forcefully push a graphics card in the PCI-e slot, it again may have exerted too much pressure on the board and broken something.

How long you had the board was the PCI-e ever working?
 

Ragnarous

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The problem i have with the pci-e slot, Is that for no reason i get black screens randomly especially when i first login into windows, it stays like that for about 10 seconds and then it says display crashed but has recovered.. I tried to also play some games and i was getting crashes all the time in all the games after 10-15 seconds.. I updated bios, format the whole pc, and installed the drivers again and the problem will not get solved.. I even tried my old graphics card with the same results.. I never placed too much pressure when installing a VGA im really careful.. But all these problems disappear after i install the vga on the second pci-e slot.. I too have standoff screws aswell so my mb doesn't touch the back of the case, just those brackets may come a bit in contact, So to sum up, i haven't done anything wrong :) Oh and for the last question, no it always was like this i never got it to work properly..
 

Ragnarous

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Do the CPU pins matter for the pci-e slot? If i remember correctly i watched a video of linus trying to fix a bent cpu pin because the processor would not work without it but nothing else except the processor..
 

Jak_Sparra

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Well it looks like you have done some testing and it does appear to be the 1st PCI-e slot. It is my understanding that the 2nd PCI-e slot should have the same bandwidth to use as the 1st slot so you would not notice any difference in gaming. The only problem would be if you wanted to go SLI/crossfire.

I know nothing about bent pins on CPUs and how they control certain things but it makes sense. If you know how and feel comfortable doing it you could take out your CPU for a look. But if it was me and I could get the performance I was expecting from PCI-e 2 the same as PCI-e 1 then I'd probably just leave things as they were until I was ready to do a new build in a couple of years or so.

 

Ragnarous

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Yea, that's pretty much what i was planning to do aswell.. But i really hate Asus for this, i bought this motheboard again in the past but used at the time and it lasted only for about a month.. Now this one has this problem right out of the box and it was brand new.. I can still SLI in the 2 and 4th slot but they will get sandwiched because the 1st and 3rd have a pci-e x1 in the middle so that it gets the proper airflow.. I'm really afraid to take out the CPU as i don't have a well paid job to make up for any mistakes i might accidentally do, so i will stay like this for the moment..
 
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