Check out this innovative M.2 screw three-pronged solution

(Image credit: Bethesda)

It’s the nature of technology that new and wonderful innovations keep happening every day. When it comes to PC gaming especially, the next generation always feels like it's right around the corner. We’re already gearing up for the next lot of powerful graphics cards, and CPUs but it doesn’t stop there.

PC gaming parts are continuing to get smaller and smaller, and even widely portable with the upcoming Steam Deck release. Internals are increasingly streamlined and elegant, like the new 16-pin PCIe 5.0 power connector as human ingenuity continues to push PC gaming to its very pinnacle. And this one person stuck a plastic fork to their motherboard.

Peak Storage

SATA, NVMe M.2, and PCIe SSDs on blue background — (Image credit: Future)

Best SSD for gaming: the best solid state drives around
Best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming: the next gen has landed
The best NVMe SSD: this slivers of SSD goodness
Best external hard drives: expand your horizons
Best external SSDs: plug in upgrades for gaming laptops and consoles

There’s little more satisfying in life than a good makeshift solution, especially to what could be a very technical problem. ThinkComputers has posted one such wonderful solution to Twitter, where a red plastic fork has been used to hold down an SSD.

You may like

Sometimes you just need to improvise... pic.twitter.com/mQps9SS2QqFebruary 21, 2022

From the image it looks as though this board is lacking a 2242 screw point for the M.2 slot housing this computer’s SSD, and thus needed something else to hold it in place. This resourceful human used the 2280 screw point further away, attaching a plastic fork which has the length required to hold down that far off drive. The resulting picture is wonderful, featuring a serious looking black and white motherboard with a bright red and incredibly plastic looking 3-pronged fork unceremoniously screwed to it. It looks like when kids fix something in a cartoon. Can you imagine how confused this fork would be in the Toy Story universe?

Of course, dear readers, we caution you not to try such things at home. Computers can generate a lot of heat, and there’s every chance your plastic fork could become a toxic mess. Imagining this one melting makes me a little nervous just looking at it. No one likes to get hot fork mess all through their PC. Instead, we’d probably recommend checking out our list of best gaming motherboards for 2022 and maybe pick something that has all the screws your build requires.

Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here. No, she’s not kidding.