shorted power supply/mainboard

Greetings Folks,

recently my system shut down unexpectedly - no big deal I think. So I started back up, everything seemed ok. But 15 minutes later - boom off again.

So I'm starting to get suspicious and I find that now it will not stay on for more than 2 minutes at a time, sometime it will not even boot up.

I am fortunate enough to have a good amount of spare parts around so i was able to unplug most of the unnecesary equipment from the board and then run with just video, mouse + keyboard and swapped out the following components to see which was having the problem

-ram
-HD
-video card
-CD ROM

Well none of that made a difference so I was down to the mainboard, the power, and the CPU.

My board was a Soyo DragonPlus, CPU AMD Athlon XP 1700 and power JGE 300watt.

So I went to fry's and purchased a new board and CPU combo - as I was disconnected the power lead from the mainboard (yes I had grounded myself and removed power from the unit - I am ESD certified by HP so dont think I caused this myself) I noticed the power lead was a bit stiff coming out - and eventually made a snap sound .. and sure enough I look in the power connector and part of the plug-in has snapped off inside - not only that is it black as if it burned/shorted out.

So I inspect the power cord end better and see 3 of the prongs are blackened - only one is so on the mainboard. The one that got stuck.

Given this I am lead to beleive my problem of course was power related - but seeing it occur right at the power connector makes me feel every component attached to this power is now suspect of having problems - and I will troubleshoot and isolate...

Finally though here is my boggle - my Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 video card has a slight smell of that plasticy ionization smell you get when an electronic component burns out - it could be it inherited this smell from the burnout that occured at the power connector - or that the videocard .. perhaps had a failure and then caused the system shut down and .. I'm wondering could it have been bad enough to cause a short that would have resulted in the blackened around the power connectors to the mainboard?

That seems unlikely to me. Ive had cards go - and everything else on the board be OK before. But I'm a bit concerned about popping a potentially bad card into my new mainboard *smoke* *fizzle* .. any suggestions on isolating this before I plug it in?

Or..any other helpful suggestions would be nice just thinking about this while Im at work today before I go home and try it all out.

thanks in advance.

melkior