My graphics card stopped working from time to time. So now I took it out and had a look on it. I discovered that some pins seem to be broken.
Can this make fatal damage to a card? Because it looks like it would still connect.
The card was sometimes not detected in the Slot and stopped working randomly.
Best Answer
What you’re seeing is actually not a broken connector. These pins are intentionally kept short so they connect last. Remember that PCIe is hot-plug capable, you can add (and theoretically also remove) cards in a running system. If you look inside a USB plug, you can see something similar: The data pins are shorter than the power supply pins.
The short pin near the rear of the card is “PRSNT2#”. The one to the front is “PRSNT1#”. It’s connected to the rear pin and informs the motherboard of the length (in PCIe channels) of the card. There are multiple possible “PRSNT2#” locations, one for each possible card length.
You can read more on the PCIe connector on Wikipedia.