Spoke with one of the #IT guys and confirmed what I thought, more of less; I've fried my computer by using the 48-pin to 8-pin adapter to plug the upgraded PSU into my motherboard.
I'll need to rebuy everything to get my old setup back. Not the worst thing in the world, most of what I was doing was in the cloud; even the gaming I did was online gaming on servers. But downloading everything and installing the same old parts will be such a pain and take a fair bit of time...
@realcaseyrollins I must be misunderstanding. Generally you can put in a higher-power PSU without ill effect; the notion that a motherboard only supports up to a certain wattage is odd. It draws a certain amount of current at a particular voltage, and your PSU just has to maintain the rail at the correct voltage. A bigger PSU can maintain the voltage in the face of you drawing a greater current, but it isn't going to overvolt your other components. You can even run it completely unloaded and measure the potential across its outputs with a multimeter - it's not going to spike up to infinity trying to force current through the disconnected wires.
There's a partial exception if you swap between consumer/workstation/server/gaming PSUs or ones of very different age. The reason is that there are a few different rails, and, at different points in time and across different market segments, the demand for current on each rail has changed. So you may buy a model that has a higher total rating, but has *less* power available on a particular rail you need, because it's designed for applications where that rail is used less.
@khird Interesting.
Something may have been up with the PSU I ordered; it had both 24 and 8 pin cables for power. The 8 pin cables did nothing, and I think it was using the 24 pin cables plus the adapter that shorted the motherboard. In theory, the 8 pin cable should have worked fine.