Last summer I bought a broken power supply (without knowing of course) and put it in my computer. Turning my box on made one of my cheaper HDDs catch fire (I believe a capacitor or resistor blew) and I thought I completely killed my system.
My other 4 hard drives survived the surge (Western Digitals, better quality is why I guess they were spared). And I never had any problems with my motherboard/RAM/CPU because of it. I bought a new power supply and left it behind me.
In the past couple months my computer has been randomly crashing for no apparent reason. I'm never able to recreate the crash, as I can never tell when it's going to happen (it doesn't even seem to have anything to do with intense usage). The process goes as follows:
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The computer fully turns off. Just dies. However, the little light on my motherboard telling me my power supply is on, is still on.
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Pressing the power button on my computer doesn't have any effect here. To restart I have to manually turn off the killswitch of my power supply. When I do this, the light on my motherboard goes off and my subwoffer makes a sound. Then it comes back on for a second (accompanied by another subwoffer noise). Then it turns off.
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Turning the killswitch back on, I can reboot and hope it doesn't happen again.
At first I thought overheating (I was running at high Vcore and my CPU temperature was high). I turned on the "Cool n' Quiet" function of my motherboard, and I still got a crash.
Next thing, obviously, is power supply. However, I was wondering if the initial broken power supply I bought damaged my motherboard or something like that. Which could explain why a power supply that was bought from a trusted store and brand new is seemingly "failing".
So basically what should I do? Replace my power supply again? What if the motherboard is breaking my power supply (if that's even possible)? Should I just spend 500$ on a new motherboard + power supply?
EDIT: I've noticed that it crashes mostly when I'm watching a YouTube video or watching an HD movie in VLC. It's odd because a software pattern is seemingly effecting hardware 🙁
EDIT 2: I now believe this might be a CPU overheating issue. Someone please tell me if CPU overheating could cause what I'm about to explain. I ran Clementine (music player) with full screen visualizations enabled on fast mode. While I was doing this, I was watching the CPU temp go up and up. It finally capped at around 81C, at which point I opened a browser to see how 'hot' that was. The crash happened. Is this definite proof that I'm dealing with an overheating issue?
EDIT 3: My CPU is AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ rated at 3.1GHz (or something around that frequency). I'm not over-clocking at all.
FINAL EDIT: I'm happy to announce that I've solved it with the help of you guys. I bought some artic silver thermal paste for about 8$ and applied it to the CPU/HeatSink. Along with a good de-dusting and some better cable management, my computer is running at a cool 35C idle. Thanks to everyone who helped.
Best Answer
What you described to me looks like some sort of safety system in the power supply.
I recommend that you disassemble whole computer and check for any burn marks on the motherboard and pretty much everything else. There could be something which causes a short and makes power supply turn off. Pay close attention to computer case and check if it's moving or vibrating.
Next step would be to check cables in your power supply. If you have multi-rail power supply, you could be hitting rail limit for power. Make sure that load is distributed among cables and devices. If a cable has several connectors on it, try to use up all other cables first before using extra connectors. Make sure that you balance load on cables with several connectors. For example on a cable going into a hard drive make sure you only connect low power consumers and so on. This in general shouldn't be a problem, but some power supplies can be picky and may have bad load distribution.
Next check how different devices are mounted. I once had a similar problem. I bought a new computer and every once in a while it would shut down unexpectedly. In the end it turned out that the incompetent or malicious manufacturer used too long screw on the floppy drive. They penetrated inside and caused shorts from time to time. Make sure that nothing similar is happening in your case.