@anon81945988 Not at all, this is fine. I think that any expansion card, absent any tricks like the HDMI card, will consume more power than the equivalent function being built into the board. This will occur purely for the same reason as above, an inability to move to a low-power state when not actively used. If the DAC is on the motherboard then it can move to this low-power state.
Unless they have improved the design where the expansion cards are no longer straight converting signals and communicating with the motherboard. As it stands now, they simply convert signals although I suppose some minor amount of communication must occur to ensure that conversion occurs properly. I think the DAC and the detection of if something is plugged in will all be on the expansion card.
I won’t claim to be an expert, I’m just regurgitating what I’ve read from various threads on the forum and from Framework employees on the matter. I don’t know how they could make the expansion cards smarter and I imagine, if they could, they would have created a Mark II version of all problematic expansion cards.
Small error, it isn’t HDMI, it is the DisplayPort cards that have a workaround. I’ll update my above posts now.