GA-7VAXP destroys power supplies?!

[thomasneil28]

I bought my Gigabyte GA-7VAXP 9 months ago and it has been working fine since then (and I get plenty of use out of it),,, until now.. After playing a few hours of Far Cry last saturday my computer shut down. I started it back up, and a few minutes later it shut down again... Permanently. The power supply (350 watt kingwin) smelled...it was toast. Logically I assumed that the power supply was bad so I returned/exchanged it for a new one of essentially identical kind(350 watt kingwin), and upon installing it I started up the comp. During startup I saw "CMOS checksum error" and then it was unable to detect my hard drive (which is actually 2 striped hard drives, specs below) then it just sat there trying to detect the hard drive, infinitely. I changed some bios settings and jacked around for awhile, then tried using a boot disk in order to explore my hdd in dos,, but unfortunately the comp couldnt read the hdd. About that same time the comp shut down once again, and once again the BRAND NEW power supply was shot. 2 Power supplies in 2 days. No coincidence I am sure. Being the noob that I am I am assuming the motherboard is causing the problem, but would like to hear from anyone who has any other ideas?
Some extra information is that for a few weeks my computer has randomly restarted, as well as given random critical system error messages. Are these signs of a mobo going bad??

Also the small fan on the motherboard stopped spinning a few days prior and i took it off, cleaned off the dust, and put it back in place, and it worked. Could this tiny fan be trying to pull too much power??

I closely monitor my temperatures, and no I do not overclock. Temperatures hung around 40C for processor and 45C for system prior to "that fateful day"

Video card was tested after the crashes,, works fine. Sound card also works fine. Unable to test RAM as I have no backup comp w/ ddr slots. Also cant test processor nor hdd's.

WTF? What all possible components could destroy the hard drive?

SPECS
Gigabyte GA-7VAXP
AMD Athlon XP 2500+
GeForce Ti4200 by Chaintech
Plextor DVD+-RW
Samsung CD-RW
2 WD1000BB HDD's striped to form one 200 gig hdd
Sound Blaster Live Value
3com Etherlink 10/100
2 512mb sticks of Kingston Value Ram 333mhz

Thanks in advance

 

[thomasneil28]

woops, that line above my specs is supposed to say "what components could destroy the POWER SUPPLY, not hard drive"

 

[Peter]

Random restarts are usual signs of an overstressed, poorly regulating power supply. I'd rather not trust a second power supply of the same kind that just blew up on me.

A _real_ 350W power supply should be adequate for the job, but there's plenty of cheap PSUs with overinflated ratings out there.

 

[thomasneil28]

peter, do you think that the psu could have also caused problems with my motherboard and hdd's during its death? because before the second power supply burnt up i was unable to get to windows and my mobo would not detect my hdd's.

 

[Peter]

The power very possibly has been bad long before you saw the smoke and the flames.