OK. there are different wattages of power supplies. I understand that part.
Can power supplies be too powerful, and fry your mobo, or does it just give power that the mobo needs, and uses the rest to support your hdd, cd-roms, and fans, etc.?
The reason asking is because I bought a mobo, cpu, and case with a power supply in it, put it all together, and my computer for one reason or another just... fried, it burned some wires connecting from the power cables to one of the PCI slots that wasn't used. that computer is sitting down in my basement collecting dust right now, but:
1. would my cpu still be good? (haven't tested it on any of my other systems yet)
2. what exactly was the problem? (I didn't mess with the voltage, so don't jump to that conclusion)
Oh, and for no. 2, I did have a AGP NVidia/Geforce card in it. What happened is that it kept freezing on me when i went to cmos, or let it run. I thought it was the video card, so I put in one of my older pci cards in to it (took the AGP one out, of course), and then i found out it didnt help it, so I took out the PCI one and replaced the AGP one, then when I turned it on, and I smelt smoke coming from my pc, so I turned it off, looked at the mobo, and it was burned on the side...
Let me know if you need more info...
[edit] This all happened a year ago, and the warranties are all dead, so fuck to Shuttle and tigerdirect, where I bought it. (yeah, this is sorta the same post about my computer that fucked up, but I want to know exactly what happened in those fast five minutes...)