Power Supply Question

[killumanati]

My system consisted of the following

Epox AMD761 Motherboard
1.4 Tbird
512 PC2100
2 Maxtor 40GB drivers running raid 0
DVD drive
CDRW Drive
Sound Blaster Live Value
3com NIC
TV Tuner
1 Light strip
2 8mm case fans
1 floppy drive

***300 Watt power supply***
Recently my system started acting strangely...rebooting,blinking out,video issues. So when I started removing things from the computer i finally removed the
power supply connector from the motherboard, what i discovered was a burn mark on the power supply connector and on the motherboard connector..needless to say the motherboard is gone.

My question is this, can an underpowered power supply cause this kind of damage to the motherboards and its own connector???

 

[zepper00]

Not necessarily due to low power PSU, but poor contact between PSU connector and pin in mobo socket or poor solder joint of pin either of which causes a high-resistance and concentrated heating. I have had that happen before.
I used a good pipe cleaner (Dr. Grabow or equiv.) and contact cleaner and cleaned the contact(s) in the mobo socket and the contact in the PSU plug and tightened up the female (tighten up all of them while you're at it) part of the connection and it worked ok--at least for a while. It happened later with more pins so I RMAd it to Enlight and they replaced the PSU.
They are using pretty cheap contacts in these cheap PSUs. If it wasn't such a PITA, I'd replace ALL contacts in PSU connectors with new AMP or Molex ones before I used it. One of the drive connectors on my current Enlight PSU keeps loosening up.
I guess I'll just have to buy all of my cases w/o PSU from now on, and just get PC Power & Cooling units to put in them.

.b.h.