PSU is dead, long live the PSU

[mrbullseye]

At least i think it is. The thing is, I was playing some far cry yesterday. testing out the HDR effects on my relatively new hardware. Upgraded my equiptment a few weeks ago to what you see to the left here. Anywhoo, I was playing, and all of a sudden I noticed a burning smell. Like burning plastic, or the smell of soldering metal getting... soldered. you know? I looked around the room and dind't notice anything until smoke started coming out of my computer. I looked onscreen, and the game was still running. No problem there. My gpu wasn't overheated, and neiter was my cpu. I have Gpu temp-monitoring running all the time on screen through Ati Tray Tools, and a cpu overheating alarm set in BIOS, so I couldn't understand what was burning.

My heart racing, I lept for the powerswitch and understood that it would take too long, it won't shut power off until I've held it pressed for five seconds or so, so I manually pulled the plug from the wall. By this time I was genuinely worried that my GPU or CPU had died. It's only in retrospect I've come to the conclusion that they had nothing to do with it. I had no artifacting on screen, no Overclocking whatsoever, and no alarms blaring. So after checking all wires to see if something had melted for being to close to my fairly hot (80-85 degrees C under load) GPU, I realised that it must have been my new antec earthpower 500w PSU that had died a smoking death. 8O

At least I think it's dead. Haven't had the guts to turn power back on, and rightly I think that that wouldn't be such a good idea considering what happened yesterday. i don't want to risk damaging my other components more that they probably already are.

So my question is this. What should I do now? I have no rig to try my PSU on, No other parts that I'm not so afraid of. Should I simply RMA it and hope for the best. a simple sniff at the PSU tells me that it's dead. And I do not know how to put this theory to the test.


My Rig is this:
Abit KN9 ultra Mobo
AMD 64 x2 6400+
powercolor ATI x1950xt 256MB
1024MB CL5 RAM
Antec earthwatts 500w (17+17A)
Creative Audigy Platinum soundboard
2 pata, 1 sata, 1 optical

I am utterly thankful for any help.
Rock on

 

[mrbullseye]

well actually, the earthwatts should be one of antecs top products. Made by seasonic as far as I know, and that should be some indication of a good quality product. (or?)

maybe I just got a dud, I dunno. Will RMA it tomorrow anyway. Any advice on whether I should get a new one just like this, or something else alltogether?

Thanks for the input thus far. 8)