Support for patches and alternate driver revisions (or alternate installation utilities) used to be a lot better for these boards/chipsets. Between official support and user groups (and old forums and chatrooms), I'm pretty sure there were a lot more options to tweak things to general functionality.
Dad had a lot of things hacked together that way on our shared/family/multimedia/HT PC between 1997 and 2000, and some of that stuff became hard to find even a few years later. (he had a working, stable, and compatible cobbled together DVD video home theater software suite that worked quite well in our K6-2 300 + Rage Pro PCI build using a mix of beta drivers and other pieced together components)
That stopped working after a full system upgrade around 2000, or rather he switched to using more standard DVD video software (not windows media player of the time, but something common and brand name, I could probably pick from a list, but forget off-hand) and that turned out to be annoying due to copy protection 'features' preventing us from reliably using the AV output of the Rage Pro. Attempts to resurrect the old software on the new system proved problematic. (It probably still worked 1:1 on the old build, which had been handed down to me at that point, but Dad didn't go that route)
Come to think of it, it might have been an ATi Rage specific software suite we had originally.
I'm not sure what board we had in that machine, but I suspect an MVP 3 one since it got replaced/swapped with a slightly newer VA-503A at some point (or the release date of that board is earlier than I've seen doccumented online, and Dad actually got it new in 1998 as part of the K6-2 upgrade). That board also has onboard sound (VIA 686A southbridge with SB compatibility) and I don't think ever used an external sound card.
I'm not sure what sound board he put in the Soyo ZX (Celeron 366) board that I'm pretty sure went into that family/multimedia PC since it lacks onboard sound. (maybe one of our PC sound cards or fall back to the PAS-16, especially since we only had a 2.1 or 3.1 speaker set-up at the time) Also no idea if he overclocked that thing, though given I actually had it running at 550 MHz for a while without short-term issues a few years back, I suspect so. (2.0V, non-adjustable on that board too, but with the BX style PCI/AGP divider for 100 MHz, though the 75 and 83 MHz settings overclock those; it had the stock cooler and the 550 setting is probably really sensitive to higher temps, so probably 75 or 83 depending on what the video and sound cards tolerated)
OTOH, he may have gotten a PCI based Rage over an AGP one based on the stability and driver compatibility issues some SS7 boards have/had at the time. (that's one thing that seems mostly absent in Windows 98SE and later era drivers, at least for these mid/late 90s cards: AGP Rage 128 Pro, TNT, Radeon, and Geforce cards give more trouble using install utilities, but manually copying the DLLs to the proper location usually works ... it's just a headache to do if you're not used to it)
People mention all sorts of headaches with VIA based S370 boards, too, but I don't remember having much problem back then (it is a bit harder to get things set up now, or 10 years ago, though, and my retro builds have never been as stable as our home-built systems were back then). I haven't installed anywhere near the number of driver updates and patches for the various devices (and individual games) though, and don't run any of those systems online. (in the event there's any online automatic updates available for those old games)
I remember some of the Factor 5 based Lucas Arts games being much less trouble back then than they seem to be now. (I had Rogue Squadron and Episode 1 Racer working quite well on that K6-2 rig, LAN play worked well on Racer, too)
Intel chipsets (for the most part) from that era seem to have had better 'out of the box' support and also had better built-in drivers for various windows installation CDs or service pack upgrades.
That and I think the actual chipset/memory timing/bandwidth performance tended to be better (socket 7 aside, since that had blows traded several times and intels own CPUs do really well in memory benchmarks on some competing chipsets). OTOH I'm not sure how they compare for overclocking support. (board + CPU stability at various FSB settings, voltages, etc) Sometimes slow chipsets overclock well. And/or they overclock well and any quirks/stability issues don't get any worse than at stock settings. (still not great for I/O bound software)
Oh, and I know the VIA 686B has that HDD (IDE/PATA) corruption issue with SB Live cards, but that's also not S7 relevant since only the 686A was used there. (though I believe there are still specific settings and drivers needed for the SBLive to work properly with the 686A, and not just disabling the legacy audio feature ... I think it's an issue with plug n' play resource allocation) It's nice if you actually use the onboard sound though, with sound blaster compatibility and fairly decent OPL3 clone implementation. (supposedly more accurate than Creative's CQM, not sure how it compares to some of the closer clone FM chips, though or how the signal quality of the output compares ... or how that varies by board: I have a few boards with that chip)
Oh, also as to actual crashing and stability:
I actually run into random system lock-ups far more than error messages of any kind (BSOD or program crash + error message window). The latter is a lot easier to remedy and usually happens with me attempting overclocking, undervolting, or odd system configurations that are generally out of spec. The random lock-ups are more confusing and hard to sort out. (between overheating, disk/OS software bugs/corruption/bad drivers/etc ... the sort of disk/OS issues that scandisk won't pick up either: not actual corrupted data per se, but installation/configuration software that did nasty things it wasn't supposed to do)
Oh that and video cards. I've had so many problems that turn out to just disappear when I swap a card out. Albeit they seem to be worse with power-hungry/hot running cards. (Savage 4 did it, Voodoo 3 does it too: the latter was causing DOS Quake to crash in 640x480 software mode as well as system lock-ups at random points during general desktop operations, especially file transfers, or just after file transfers: both floppy and HDD to HDD, one time after I closed and tried to re-open a disk directory in explorer)
It's a PCI based Voodoo 3 2000 16MB BTW. (I think the other is a Savage 4 Pro, 32 MB)
Rage XL and Rage Pro are pretty rock-solid stability wise ... not great for Direct X 6+ gaming performance, though, and annoyingly have more incompatible synch rates with my LCD monitors. (I liked the Savage for that, particularly as I could fix/limit the synch range used in the driver utility or in control panel) And I have some working CRT VGA monitors, but not the space to set them up currently, especially for a modular test system. (and the horizontal case I'm using gets the monitor stowed on top of it)
That's all on the Asus P5A-B system I've been using for most DOS/9s game and tweaking/testing for the last 10 years.