Most of those transistors are purely decorative. Go ahead and scrape a few more off - fewer components means lower power consumption!

In all seriousness, that looks like a transistor of some sort, not a cap or resistor. I don't know enough about modern motherboard design to guess its function, but I can tell you that there's not really such a thing as "redundant" components in the way you're guessing. It might be boosting some signal, it might just be for controlling those asinine lights that are on everything nowadays, but you probably want to be ready to replace that motherboard at the drop of a hat, since you're likely not equipped to repair that yourself.

Well it’s there for a reason. Might not cause issues all the time but under a heavy load it might. Shoud be cheap to repair though.

If it were a cap it could be fine without out. It looks like a diode or fet though; just because there's a bunch doesnt mean there's redundancy. There's something that isn't working properly, you just don't know it yet. Double check you are operating at full 16x on the gpu pcie slot. They could also be ESD protection diodes, in which case the mobo will run fine without it as long as you don't shock the crap out of it

Have you tried booting into the operating system, or have you installed the OS yet?