I personally prefer VIA over NF chipset boards, even though VIA chipsets of that age had their own particular problems.
I prefer VIA as the NF chipsets often ran much hotter and the chipset often required active cooling while the VIA's run perfectly fine running passively.
Also I'm not sure if NF chipsets were affected by the substrate fiasco.
Both my offline database (VIA s939) and 1 of my main LAN rigs (VIA s754) have run almost perfectly stable, so no reason to switch to another chipset 😀
However, I do want to point out 1 significant problem with the VIA chipsets of that era:
As you may already know, the VIA SATA controllers were plagued by incompatibility problems using SATA2 devises on their VIA VT8237R and prior southbridges, which were fixed with the VIA VT8237R Plus southbridge.
Afaik the VIA VT8237R will not work with any SATA2 devices, they will simply not be recognised!
I try to avoid these if I can, unless I can get a s939/s754 VIA board for like €10 or so. Boards with the VIA VT8237R Plus will work fine with SATA2 devises, even though they run them at SATA1 speeds (both are SATA1 controller chipsets).
So, if you find a VIA chipsetted (lol, is that even proper English? 😜) board, see if it has the VIA VT8237R or the VIA VT8237R Plus.
Having the non-Plus wouldn't be a catastrophe though, for what I use them for any SATA1 harddrive will be perfectly fine (remember that SATA laptop harddrives remained at SATA1 for much longer then desktop harddrives 😉 ).
About the CPU's, I'd suggest you read yourself into the available CPU's as theres several different ones available.
In short, I prefer to use the single cored ones with the Venice core, they are the coolest running.
Hope this helps 😉
If you have any further questions, I'd be more then happy to help you out mate! 😉