That mb appears to have 8 channel audio on the backplane (7.1) and maybe another stereo header for the front panel headphones? That would make 10 channels in total which fits…

Interesting. Is the orange line on the board separating the audio section from the rest?

You’re probably right—I searched for ‘20 mosfets in parallel’ or something like that and it came up near the top. But I didn’t read the whole thing.

I guess there’s got to be some reason for using so many though?

My gut feeling is they didn’t put 20 there in case you scraped one off. But likely the others will have enough leeway to cover for it. If the power rail gets stressed enough, it might well fail sooner than it would have.

From the TI briefing note:

Paralleling power metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) is a common wayto reduce conduction losses and spread power dissipation over multiple devices to limit the maximum junction temperature.

It would also provide redundancy in case of a failure—if you had only one, and it failed (or was scraped off by an over-enthusiastic GPU installation), you would probably not be going to space today.

I think I covered this the last time you posted, but swearing isn’t a sign of maturity. It’s generally a sign of limited vocabulary.

You may need to reconsider this view. One example (there are others):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S038800011400151X

Yeah, I was being trite but still there is a reason. Idle doesn’t mean doing nothing. Perhaps it’s obscure, perhaps as impenetrable as some combination of machine state and number of milliseconds since 1970 being an even number. But you could try to track it down.

And sometimes the easiest thing is to reinstall from scratch.

Nothing crashes for no reason. Until you identify the reason, you’re employing stochastic problem solving.