PSA: You should never do this when you buy an Amiga...

[James1095]

Sounds like the power supply failed to me. It's never a good idea to switch something on and off rapidly, if it doesn't work properly on the first go, take the time to find out why.

[James1095]

Most of the time when something burns like that it's due to a fault in the power supply. I'm not familiar with the PSUs used in Amigas but there are failure modes where one or more output voltages can go way up and fry a bunch of stuff. I had a desktop PC about 15 years ago where the power supply failed with a bang and in the process it fried the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and video card. I think the sound card and network card survived along with the drives.

[James1095]

Yeah, I think more modern motherboards / PSUs both have a feature where if they're getting weird voltage spikes, they just cut the power so they don't end up frying everything.  

Sounds like how one of my friends turned on his old PC and there was a literal pop, and when he showed me the PSU it rattled...

I told him that's what he gets for going with cheap PSUs... I've always thought of them as one of the most valuable things, so you shouldn't go cheap on them, since they have the greatest potential of toasting everything.

I wish I could get another system next to my A4000 so I could test another accelerator board in it to make sure it'll work in mine anymore.  But the A3640 seems to be working fine at the moment, and I figure I'll just wait maybe for the Vampire for the A4000...

Well designed power supplies will (theoretically) shut down if any of the rails are out of spec, but that doesn't mean it's not possible for a catastrophic failure to take something out. I agree, a good power supply is worth the money. You don't need massive wattage though, I see 700W+ power supplies these days while I've measured my Core i7 desktop and it pulls less than 140W from the wall with all the cores maxed out. Add a couple of high end 3D video cards and you might approach 450W.