https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchip … ch-m919-ver-3-2 - It's pictured with one and two there, I'd use two from the same batch though, no idea what they do to achieve balance

They do nothing for balancing, the two transistors are simply connected in parallel.

This is bad design when you are using bipolar transistors (you can do it with MOSFETS). In practice one of the transist0rs takes most of the load while the second one idles - unless you carefully select two sampes with identical electrical parameters. Even in this case due to aging sooner or later asymmetries will occur.

Best practice is to use one transistor and when it´s maximum current isn´t enough use a more powerful one with a better heatsink. -> just like every decent mainboard manufacturer did...

majestyk wrote on 2026-05-31, 04:56:

They do nothing for balancing, the two transistors are simply connected in parallel.

This is bad design when you are using bipolar transistors (you can do it with MOSFETS). In practice one of the transist0rs takes most of the load while the second one idles - unless you carefully select two sampes with identical electrical parameters. Even in this case due to aging sooner or later asymmetries will occur.

Best practice is to use one transistor and when it´s maximum current isn´t enough use a more powerful one with a better heatsink. -> just like every decent mainboard manufacturer did...

This explains why the board just stick with only 1 transistor. Thanks for the advice, pairing two of them could cause a nightmare.

Matth79 wrote on 2026-05-30, 11:31:

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchip … ch-m919-ver-3-2 - It's pictured with one and two there, I'd use two from the same batch though, no idea what they do to achieve balance

Maybe they want to do balance with resistor, but just fake out like L2 cache.