What caused my PC to go pop and blow itself up?

[charles_i]

The specs:
An old AcerPower FE - Motherboard 8I915AE
2 x 1G Kingston memory (quite old as well)
Power Supply - FSP300-60THA(1)
Asus HD 5450 graphics card (1 month old)
Windows 7

Last week I came in to work (it was my workhorse work PC) - hit the power switch which lit up and about 10 to 20 seconds later it went "pop" like a fire cracker. No more power. No evidence of scorching that I can find anywhere. Although, the light on the on switch stayed on until I physically unplugged it. I did try to hook up the hard drive at home to copy stuff off of it and it started to smoke and fried its circuit board. (Not too dire I have backups from a month ago.)

My questions is, did the power supply blow up? If not, did something else blow up the power supply? Could the graphics card have something to do with it? (If so, it seems strange because it was OK for a month - on from 10 to 12 hours a day on week days.) I'd like to use this graphics card again, but don't want to risk killing another computer if that was what did it in. Is there a CPU limit to these cards, or is the new card just coincidental?

Thanks for your input.
Charles

 

[swilczak]

There is a very good chance that it was the power supply because it has many large capacitors that can blow up, especially as it gets older the capacitors can split open.

 

[charles_i]

Interesting, I've been working with PCs since they were invented - never had one do that before. As long as it wasn't the graphics card.

Any reason why the hard drive fried itself? It was SAT - those should be standard connections from one PC to another I would think, or was my power supply at home too much for it?

Thanks
Charles

 

[swilczak]

I have heard of power supplies that blow up and fry other parts in the computer such as motherboards processors and hard drives. I work on PC's a lot too and I've have never had a power supply blow up but I have heard many people talk about it in online forums. It usually happens either from a power surge, a lightning strike, or because the graphics card taxes the power supply too much.

 

[charles_i]

Interesting, so that's what I'm after - was this graphics card too much for the power supply? The night before it blew up I left it on to render a video.

 

[swilczak]

I looked up the specs on your PSU and I don't think that card is too much for it, but it is a cheap power supply and I know that happens more often with the cheap ones.