Mid-game PC shut off - turned it back on and heard the dreaded 'POP' as well as that HORRIBLE smell.

If you've built enough PCs like I have, you will know the smell I am speaking of. A heart-sinking feeling of dread followed - PSU or vid card was my initial diagnosis.

Backstory - I built a new rig last month, going with a 2600x/Asus Prime x470 Pro, Vengeance RGB Pro RAM and an HP EX-920 NVMe SSD. I re-used the HDD, vid card and PSU, an older Antec 750w High Current model. And as much as I know you should not carry a PSU over to a new build, I was tapped out for $ to buy a replacement. But after building it, I felt like carrying over the old 290x was holding it back, so I had only $100 to put into a GPU upgrade, and the best I could afford was a used Fury card. All seemed well - I ran a number of benchmarks and stress tests on the system earlier in the day, then played Sniper Elite V2 for about 40 minutes, and the total shutdown hit.

So today, I gave the sniff test to the GPU and PSU, and I can't smell anything burned on either component. The rig worked fine after the startup pop and smell. Now I could shrug it off and say sometimes the PSU will 'pop' when you plug it in, but .. that smell !!!! I know that smell is the smell of an electronic component dying. I pulled the PSU and GPU and gave both a sniff test - nothing. Neither smelled like I expected it to. Out went the Antec, in went a Corsair TX850M from a spare build, and so far, so good.

The Corsair is currently under RMA (gotta do what I gotta do just to get the rig up and going, even if I have to take the PSU back out in 2-3 days) so I'm still stressing about this. Its been a long time since I've smelt that smell ... fried an Athlon XP 1600+ back in the day by mounting the HSF backwards on the socket. Anything else I can check, or then keep gaming and wait for it to pop again ? I saw nothing on the board as well. It's not so much what you see when this happens, its where your nose leads you, as that's the dead giveaway on what went bad on you.