Several cramped components, is this safe or could cause a short?

[Cyber Akuma]

I have a rather cramped setup. I have an air cooler, a NVMe, a soundcard, and a GPU all sort of jammed close within the same area barely clearing each other, and I am wondering if it's safe that everything is so close.

For the NVME, it's a 4.0 NVME and it's plugged into the only 4.0 slot on the motherboard. That slot is also the only slot without a heatsink, so I installed one. Issue is, since the soundcard is going to be sitting right on top of it, I had to get a low profile one. I found the lowest profile one I could get, and tested to see if it would clear the Soundcard.

At first, I was very worried, because it seemed like the soundcard was resting directly on the heatsink, and I wasn't sure how safe this would be:

However, once I screwed it in, it seemed to rise up a little and clear the heatsink by a tiny bit:

Is the above ok? (Not a fan of heatsinks that just attach by clips/silicon bands, but not much options for me).

However, once I screwed in the card, I had a new problem. Like I mentioned, the soundcard is jammed very close between the CPU cooler and the GPU, it's the only slot I really can put it in without effecting my GPU's link speed. I measured everything and got that it should JUST fit. However, while it did just barely fit, once I put the screw in, it seems to make it lean to the side a bit and touch against the fan on the CPU cooler:



It's touching a rubber part, and clearing the metal parts of the cooler (I am pretty sure) but again, I am not sure how safe this is, or if this just looks fine? (The GPU is not installed yet in any of these photos).

Also, is it safe to put black electrical tape on the back of the sound card? From the photos, it looked like the back of the soundcard was smooth and it was almost like a backplate, but now that I have the card in my hands, there are soldered pins sticking out the back a bit. Can I put electrical tape over these? Or does that risk the tape falling/melting off and causing even more problems? Or is there something better I can use than tape that would fit in such a tiny clearance?

 

[toast0]

I worry a little bit about the fan vibrating and rubbing against the sound card, but I dunno. It's probably fine. I would try to get some kapton tape instead of electrical tape; should be more heat resistant (although if you hit temperatures that are bad for electrical tape, you're in a lot of trouble already), and more importantly the adhesive should likely be cleaner when you take it off.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

The problem you're going to have is parts sagging over time if it's a tower case. While it may look fine now, it could be a problem later on.

I wouldn't use any sort of tape because the heat is going to turn the adhesive into goo and it'll run everywhere. Tape also wouldn't help insulate when you have basically hundreds of knives vibrating on top of it, and solder joints poking under it. You'd need some sort of foam tape to wedge between there, but it'll still suffer the same heat issues. Maybe cut a thin sheet of plexiglass and wedge it in there?

But I'd honestly ditch the sound card entirely, unless the motherboard audio is broken or something. Motherboard audio has been good enough for most use cases since the Athlon XP era, when they finally worked out how to isolate the audio circuitry from the rest of the motherboard.