interesting, the Wikipedia article about VIA explains it quite well.
These are pictures of both sides of the mainboard.
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I have a mainboard with a short circuit (approx. 0 Ohm) on the 3.3V rail. As usual, I injected current and observed the mainboard with the thermal camera. Instead of individual components becoming warm, I observed that an area of several square centimeters became evenly warm from approx. 2A.
Has anyone ever seen anything like this? Is it possible that there is a short circuit between two layers of the mainboard? The visual inspection of the mainboard did not reveal any abnormalities....

The supervisor password is stored in the EC (MEC1663)....