buying a new mother board just to find out it's faulty after spending all the time installing it... *sigh*

Nope. :p

This is why I prefer father boards.

This. :p

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gpP4zieZ9g

Well, you can return it right ?

Nope, I've experienced just about every other component being DOA, but not a motherboard yet. I've had plenty of motherboards fail later on though. It's the worst component to go wrong. Such a massive headache to diagnose, let alone replace. My sympathies...

you need to talk to Crosmando :)

No, he needs to talk to either Cristina Crawford, Norman Bates, or Glen Danzig.

Thankfully it has a 1 year warranty. I just spent 8 hours trying all possible solutions. I'll be honest and it makes me want to cry... * second sigh *

What brand was the board? I've always had good experiences with Asus boards myself.

It was a gigabyte. The part that gets is the fact is a chipset 1366 model so they're an absolute pain to come by.

Yep, once bought an SOYO SY-P4VTP (I think that was the model #) motherboard; intel Williamette CPU Pentium 4, had a bad PCI slot and faulty DIMM slot. Replaced but didn't matter, the board was not very good. Even with the P4 3.4ghz CPU and a PNY geForce 6600GT, it didn't deliver what it promised on the box.

It was visually stunning, PCB in black; purple PCI slots, 1 white AGP 4x slot, purple DIMM slots but that's about it.

Switched to Abit and ASUS after with my first Athlon64 setup being an Abit A8N 32x, an Athlon64 3800+ and the PCIe XFX geForce 7900GS Black Edition.

I only install the motherboard in the case after I've made sure it POSTs properly and won't shut down after MEMtest.

It has happened once for me and it was a PITA. I had actually installed every part and had zip tied all my cables down, so it was heartbreaking to have to remove everything to send the board back. Since then, I no longer tie anything down until windows is installed, fully updated, and I have played a game for a full day or two without a crash.
I actually almost destroyed a motherboard back before the PS2 keyboard era. Back in them days Windows 95 used to take forever to shutdown, and I was having an issue with some PCI board. I had removed the board the previous boot and put the blank in it's place. So, I wanted to shutdown the computer and put the card back in, but instead of waiting for the power off I removed the screw from the blank. The blank fell onto the motherboard and shorted out the Din5 keyboard port (actually got to see sparks). The board still worked and eventually once I soldered in a new fuse, the keyboard port worked.

Well, at least you're doing the right thing. I once fitted a mainboard into my PC that produced some glitches, but I didn't return it, hoping that the problems would "wear themselves out" (or whichever stupid thought I may have had exactly). Afterwards, I had to run checksums and archive integrity checks on every single file I downloaded, because they kept getting corrupted. For three years, until I could afford a new motherboard.

Returning it now is frustrating, but will save you a lot of trouble.