8X AGP Pro plastic plate protector question

[Super Mario]

When I first put together my new system almost a year ago, I saw a plastic piece in the AGP slot on the motherboard. I thought it was just there to protect the slot when packaging the motherboards. SO I took it out and threw it in the trash thinking it was useless. Just a couple of days ago, I read in my manual that you should remove that plastic piece if you are inserting an AGP Pro card. Now I just realized that wait a minute. Is my AGP card a pro one or not? It is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro? Is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro an AGP Pro card taht needs the extra slot space? If my video card is not an AGP Pro, did I do myself a big msitake by taking out that plastic protector and throwing it away. Another words, is it a good safety piece to have to prevent my video card from shorting out? I realize what a stupid dumb blind decision it was to discard that plastic plate that was in the AGP Pro slot. Could someone please help me on this.

My computer has been running very well except for soemtimes I will get random system restarts. The radnom system restarts don't happen on a consistent basis and usually seem to only happen once on a cold bootup at times, but upon the second bootup after the radnom restart, my sysytem runs perfectly stable for a long straight day including when I play system resource intensive games like C&C Generals and NHL 2004. Could not having this plastic plate in the unused space in the AGP Pro slot for a non-AGP Pro video card be the cause for my random system restarts at occasional odd times not being tied to anything particular I'm doing on my PC??

System specs are as follows:

*Pentium 4 3.0GHz Canterwood w/800MHz FSB
*Gigabyte GA-8IK1100 motherboard Intel 875P Northbridge chipset
*1GB of total system RAM (2*512MB DDR SDRAM PC3200 Corsair XMS DIMMs in dual channel config)
*ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
*Antec TruePower 550WATT PSU

*2 SATA Seagate hard drives connected to Intel 82801ER SATA RAID controller with 80GB HDD connected to Port_0 and 120GB HDD connected to Port_1. 80GB HDD is the OSboot drive and contains the OS on it.

*Windows XP Professional w/SP1 and latest critical security patches applied

Help greatly apprecaited.

 

[Merlin45]

the agp pro slot is just a way to provide more power to the card, the plastic insert is there to keep idiots from sticking non agp pro cards in the power slot, your card Isn't an agp pro card AFAIK and if you had stuck it in the power slot you wouldn't get system instability, you would get a smoking mass of dead hardware.

 

[mjh8227]

AFAIK the plastic piece is just a retention piece for non AGP Pro cards to prevent them from sliding back and forth in the slot since the Pro cards are longer then the non-Pro's. I have an Abit IC7-MAX3 which has an AGP Pro 50 slot but was missing the retention piece and a 9800 Pro and I've never had a problem without the plastic retention piece. I think as long as the card is inserted properly in the slot and secured to the case it's not going to move around in the slot and fry anything.