i think you have a week to rma it to newegg. so you really have to have the time to put it through its paces, as they say. mobo defects can sometimes show up later. having said that, i have twice bought open-box mobos from newegg.
the first board I bought open-box from newegg was in august of 2003, an Asus p4pe board, which I still have to this day, no, that's not true, i just sold it as part of a a complete computer.
the only thing i ever found wrong with it, and this was much later, was that the on-board giga-LAN, although used as internet connector was fine, made transfers between comps super-slow, for which i just placed a nic card in a pci slot. but i'm not sure if this was a generalized defect on these boards.
anyway, i was happy enough with this board to have purchased a second open box board, the same model actually. this was in november of the same year. now this is where the adventure begins. your mileage may vary:
the board wouldn't boot, some kind of bios problem. continually having to reload it. now here's the thing. i live in europe, and so by the time I had gone on a visit to pick up the board in the USA at my parents' house, brought it home, bench tested it, the rma period had expired.
so i RMA-ed this board to asus in the USA. fine, they sent me back a p4p800 board as replacement. wowie zowie, right?
except this board was defective also.
so i inquire as to the possibility of rma-ing this board here in europe for which i receive a special dispensation from the Pope in China to send it to Holland. I trade some nice emails with the director of the Asus Holland facility and i send the board along.
After about a month i think it was i receive the board back and it's an Asus P4P800-E deluxe retail pack. couldn't believe it. Now this is about 1 year already since my original purchase. so i mount this board and this is the board i am currently using with a PIV o'clocked to 3.0ghz.
now at the moment, i am in the usa and have just picked up a new board (read NEW) from newegg, a gigabyte p35 d3sl mobo to work with on return home. so as you can see, I did not buy an open-box mobo this time. i guess i am getting less skimpy with spending and hope to avoid recurring mobo headaches.
gl