[SOLVED] Can anyone please help identify this mystery part that fell out of my computer casing/motherboard?

[Minaz]

Link: Mystery piece

Today, I was looking around in my pre-built NZXT BLD PC that just came in, and I had removed the RTX3080 graphics card from my Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Pro AX motherboard and was poking around the M.2 connectors, then when I was done, I picked up the graphics card to slot it back in. The motherboard/casing was laying on its side, not upright. Then a mystery plastic piece fell out and I couldn't for the life of me figure out where it came from, what its for, if it's an important piece to something... Could anyone give a clue as to what it is???

 

[larkspur]

Looks like the "lock" from one of your PCIe slots. It has no function other than to "lock" your PCIe card into the slot. I have removed them in the past on small form factor builds because they can be VERY hard to reach to "unlock" a card when removing the card. Check out this page for a bunch of pictures of different types of locks: https://www.asrock.com/support/faq.asp?id=274

 

[DSzymborski]

Looks kinda like the lock on the end of the PCIE slot. Did you not slide it to the right to open it before removing your GPU?

Everything should still work, but it's likely that your GPU will be less stable, especially since this is likely a heavy one (since it's a 3080). Probably more important than usual to have something in your case to ameliorate sag.

 

[kerberos_20]

It does resemble pcie card lock