Help me, PSU or Motherboard?

[buckiller]

I have a KN1 SLI lite and Aspire 550W Chameleon.

ABout a month ago I started experianceing problems where my PC would take multiple presses of the power button to turn on. Now, It wont turn on at all... and when I get a response, it is turning on for a split second then turning off. I disconnected everything except power to Mobo/CPU and still the same results.

I tested the PSU on another, older 20 pin mobo (KN1 is 24 pin) and it worked fine. I don't have another 24 pin PSU to test the KN1 mobo.

Any ideas on what the problem is? Im fairly stumped. Im gonna reassemble the entire PC to see if there was a short anywhere....

 

[buckiller]

I think I found the problem...

I took the mobo out, tryed to test it outside of case. No change.

I went to blow my nose from all the dust... and heard a loud crack, came back and saw lots of smoke coming from the PSU.

Looks like its the PSU?

 

[apt403]

Yeah, definitely the psu. That loud crack you heard was probably one of the capacitors exploding.

 

[buckiller]

I knew their cheaper stuff wasn't great... but their higher end PSUs had good reviews at the time of purchase (though now they are worse... guess because more have failed)

I won't buy from again though.