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I'm sitting at my home Gaming PC yesterday morning before work and I suddenly hear a loud pop and the PC shuts off with my UPS screaming at me.  I nearly crapped my pants, but wasn't sure exactly what caused the sound.  So I leaned over and hit the power button on my PC to turn it back on....that's when the sparks and smoke started billowing out of the back of my power supply.  Then I did crap my pants (OK not literally...probably).

I built this machine five years ago, putting in top of the line components, hoping it would last me a while.  The only thing I've replace in that time is the video card...twice, but otherwise it's been a great machine.  At this point I'm scared to death that a surge has gone through and fried most of my hardware.  Since my only real course of action is to start replacing the most likely dead components until it lives again, I decide to order a new power supply to replace my beloved Antec Quattro 850.

I decided to upgrade to an 80 Plus Gold Standard power supply and settled on the Cooler Master V1000 since it was the same cost as the 850 Watt version at Amazon (at the time).  Now at least I feel like it was a bit of an upgrade since this has more wattage and also appears to have better power effeciency.

I then spent the rest of the day researching what Motherboard, CPU and RAM I would purchase if it turns out more of my components are fried.  The power supply arrived today (Have I mentioned how much I love Amazon Prime?) and I just finished installing it.  I'm happy to say that I'm posting this from my revived PC and my wallet is super excited that I didn't have to fork over the cash for more parts.