this will be used in a dedicated whole home htpc server. money is no object

There is no best, unless you state some more criteria. There are really expensive boards, but sometimes not many people buy them, so not many bugs get found and reported, so not many new BIOS revisions are released to fix them... just an example.

If you want to build a HTPC, i would suggest a recent add-on graphics card instead of an onboard one, because they have better image quality in videos than onboard solutions mostly.