Antec Power Supply - A Purchase I Regret

it's always important to add up the wattage/power required of all the individual devices in a PC to make sure you get an adequate PSU with enough oomph ( technical term ) to run your system, with a bit of power headroom if possible.

Many recent Graphics cards take a considerable amount of power, so it is very important to make sure you get the correct wattage PSU for your rig. ( and think ahead also as you may later wish to upgrade some internals ( additional hard drives, newer graphics card etc )

I find Enermax and Corsair particularly well made and solid power supplies.

The power supply probably isn't the initial problem, even a low wattage power supply can feed the most demanding of computers, a lot of companies quote megga high power power supplies but most of the time it is over the top and not required.

I suggest your problem was the build process, did you use an anti static mat, if you did then it is products failure if not then it was just a problem waiting to happen.
If you used a strap, sorry when building a computer a strap is not good enough you need a mat, putting a component on top of the anti static bag it came out of is also guarantee the component will fail, the component inside the bag is safe because the bag keeps the static build-up on the outside of the bag.

Static does not always destroy it it can degrade, it can break a pn junction and the junction grow back, it will however be degraded and more prone to failure.

I forget the component failure rate due to static Compaq quoted when I was a server engineer but it has a substantial amount.

The PSU failing you mentioned at the end is likely to be component falure just buy a new PSU, PSU's are not static sensitive unless you open them and trust me you do not want to open them, if it lasted 3 years thats not too bad they do a lot of work.