Buying A Motherboard: Advice Sought

Hi.

I just bought a top of the line ASUS dual core server-board.
It arrived dead - wouldnt power up. Sent it back. They gave
me the option for refund or replacement. I am wondering what
the general opinion of ASUS is out there. If I decide to go with
a different board, what are the best dual core motherboards
out there - in your opinion.

The server I am building will be a seriously heavy traffic video
server.

Thanks in advance.

ASUS makes great gaming boards and their quality control sucks (as you have found out)

from what you say it sounds like you bought a gaming board, and its probably not the best choice for the type of serving your doing, depending on your budget you might want to look into a Sun UltraSPARC T1 system, they are suppose to be very very fast at serving static files (faster then a quad Xeon system), and i would expect the $4K starter system that Sun has with that CPU to beat anything you can do with a C2D

whatever you get just make sure to pick something with very very good IO, get multiple Gigabit NICs, as well as some fast drives (at least 10K RPM, and RAID them), and a a real RAID card (almost all gaming boards have "fake RAID" which is slow), look for server boards that have a real RAID (LSI is one of the biggest makers), or get a PCI-X/PCIe RAID card (again a real RAID card, they are not cheap, expect to spend about $200 or more)