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So, the question is, can brownouts damage electronics? Is it possible that the voltage drop did the damage, as opposed to a potential spike?
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Yes, and yes.
Brownouts are very dangerous, and most electronics deal with severe undervoltage poorly.
Of course, it's also quite possible that there was a quick spike that went right through the cheap surge protector; they're not always very fast about blowing, or it could have just failed silently long ago and provided no protection.
As far as your computer is concerned, the brownout probably caused the power supply to under-volt it's outputs, and you might have killed any or all of the other components as a result. Only way to really tell is by process of elimination. I'd suggest swapping the power supply for a known-good one just to be certain the MB is actually dead. The MB uses some lines from the PS that are dedicated to it, and if one of those could be fried.
In any event, just cross your fingers and hope the harddrives survived, as that can cost more than just money if you don't have recent backups. I had a drive that erased it's firmware and refused to spin up in a similar incident, but luckily I was able to recover it.
There are basically 2 ways to try and deal with a brownout situation:
1) shut off power as quickly as possible
2) boost the voltage back into normal range
Since the Panamax devices are passive, the only thing they can do is shut off power when they detect a below normal voltage. For things like TV's and receivers this should be just fine.
In order to boost voltage, though, you need some source of extra power, which basically means you need a UPS. Of course most low-end UPSs do not do anything for undervoltage situations (power is normally passed straight through, unless a complete power loss is detected), so that's no good either. Midrange UPSs (such as the APC SmartUPS line) detect undervoltage conditions and boost the voltage, or just plain switch over to battery power. I would tend to recommend that choice for computers, as it has other benefits (like software support for automatically shutting down the computer nicely).
For my computers I have a Triplite ISOBAR6DBS surge suppressor that I retired from my the home theater when I got a Panamax unit. Plugged into that is an APC SmartUPS 1400 that's served me well for many years (and through many blackouts). The ISOBAR provides strong surge suppression, as well as protection for the cable-modem line coming in, and some EMI/RF filtering. The SmartUPS provides under- and over-voltage protection, as well as the obvious battery backup. Together I think they provide a pretty good level of protection from power related problems. Of course I'm sure I just jinxed myself by saying that...
Good luck!
-- Dave
PS: Never plug a surge suppressor/protector into a UPS, as it will cause the battery to drain very quickly, as well as probably killing the protector due to the interaction of the UPSs output characteristics and the MOV device. Unfortunately it's hard to find a cheap power strip that doesn't have a surge protector in it as well.
My new plasma & receiver were off at the time so thankfully no problems there. But still it made me think.
