Bad motherboard?

I hate for this to be my first post, but I've been looking for the answer for about 8 hours between friends and other boards I frequent. I was sent here to look for help, so hi! Also I'm don't know a whole lot about internals and setting up systems, so please be patient when trying to help.

I have a Gateway GT5412.
http://www.dealtime.com/xPF-Gateway-Gateway-GT5412-Desktop-PC

Upgraded to nVidia 8600 GTS video card.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8600.html

Also upgraded PSU to a Coolmax V-500.
http://www.coolmaxusa.com/productDe...ls=overview&subcategory=120mm&category=single

The upgrades have been in the PC since April and have ran great for what I use them for. Last nite was a usual night, played on the PC for a while and went to bed. Today when I woke up my fans were a little bit louder than normal, well a lot, they're usually pretty quiet. Then when I went to get on the PC I noticed my mouse didn't have it's laser light on. Thought that my mouse had gone out. Tried to use the PC but my monitor kept telling me that I had no signal. Reset it, same problems, never got a signal to the monitor.

At this point I thought there might have been a surge. Figured maybe my monitor is bad. So I grabbed my tower, went to my sisters and tested it on one of her monitors. Same deal, no signal. Spoke with a few friends and right off the bat they told me it was PSU or mother board. Other friends had me run some tests to see what's going on.

So far, I have replaced the stock PSU, removed the PCI Express video card to try and boot with onboard card. I've also been told to remove memory, try to boot with one, if it doesn't work then switch them and try to boot with my other memory stick, I haven't done this yet.

I'm curious to know what other people think so I can KNOW that it's my mother board and replace it without worrying that I'm spending money on a good part. Currently I don't have the money to spend on a tiral and error part replacement quest. While my PC is down I'm losing money and I'd like to get it running as quickly as possible.

I've also looked into new mother boards incase that's what I have to replace. I'm fairly new to picking out hardware, so I'd like to know for certian that the one I've been looking at is compatiable with my system. Here's a link to the one I've been looking at:
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0277446

I've also heard that when I replace a mother board then sometimes there's a problem with your hard drive working and or losing information? Is this true? If I were to get the mother board above, would I have to spend hours and hours attempting to revocer the information on my hard drive? I have some VERY improtant files on there that I didn't get the chance to back up and can't afford to lose.

Thanks for the help in advance and I'm sorry for the big wall of text.

 

Generally leaky capacitors on the mobo will be the root cause of a mobo failure.

The top of the caps on your mobo should be flat and shinny. If the tops are dome shaped and rusty your caps are bad.

Sometimes caps leak from the bottom and other times they collapse ie bend in the middle.

I recently had a mobo fail due to caps failure ie dome shaped and rusty and the symptoms where the same as yours ie no signal but after I tried successively about 5-7 times the pc would eventually boot.

Good Luck