Dying PSU

[tilgare]

I've been having odd issues as of late. During intense fights, I'd get FPS lag for instance. The other night, I had an issue where I couldn't move more than a couple yards without losing video for a brief moment, going black and then flashing back on (sitting still it didn't stutter). I could solve it by dropping my gfx settings in WoW and it was corrected after restarting my computer. I figured I was bogging down my computer and it might be time for a clean up and possibly format.

Today, I noticed a burning smell. I shut down and unplugged; I was able to identify the culprit to be my power supply. Upon investigation, I discovered that my particular PSU (OCZ|OCZ700SXS 700W RT) works great for about 10 months, then out of nowhere, it poops out. As it would happen, it is 10 months old (nearly to the day). OCZ is aware of and seems to be doing a pretty good job of correcting the issue (sending replacements). They also have stated that they are confident that the flaw with this make and model will not cause any harm to any other computer components.

I'm pretty confident that the gfx issues I've been having have been related to the PSU. I'll bet the GPU wasn't getting the power it needed to support the demand WoW was putting on it, thus the half second black outs.

My question - will continuing to use my computer until I get a replacement cause me any issues? What I've read has the worst of the deaths ending with smoke but no sort of electrical fire or anything of that sort. It can apparently take them a few weeks to get the problem fixed and I do not have a back up PSU to hold me over. Will I harm anything by continuing to use it until I can install the new one? I figure I'll leave the entire system off unless I'm specifically using it (maybe sleep would be sufficient?) and probably stop running on ultra so that my card isn't taxing the PSU as hard. Thoughts?

[Nejji]

It depends on the PSU, if it was built well enough then your components should not be harmed, but that's only considering when it first went out. You will, most likely harm your computer by continuing to use the defective power supply because it most likely can't deliver the required voltage to your components at a constant rate which would damage them over time. Also, if a single graphics card is taxing a 700 watt power supply, then I have my doubts as to whether that unit really is a 700 watt unit or just some random 400 watt or so unit that's been overrated (crappy PSU manufacturers such as Diablotek do this all the time).