I had this board back when AGP was new and struggled with it back then, but eventually figured it out.
I haven't used most of the cards you mentioned on this board, but I have used an AGP Matrox G400 (non-Max) without issue. Others I've used were Geforce2 MX and S3 Virge GX2 (all AGP). I'd like to try some others but I got bogged down with benchmarking experiments, and now I've partly disassembled the machine.
If I'm understanding correctly, all of the cards you listed are AGP. Is that correct?
Can you elaborate on the failure symptoms you have with these cards?
Do they display properly in the BIOS boot screens? Do they boot into Windows only without drivers loaded, but go black after drivers are installed? Or do they still work *with* drivers loaded but then glitch out when doing 3D?
What board revision do you have? I'm not sure if it matters, but they might have made changes that affect power supplied to the AGP slot.
It's good that you're using an ATX power supply. If you use AT, then the 3.3V supply is powered with an onboard regulator only. Using ATX it should be drawing from both the regulator *and* the PSU's 3.3V rail, but some revisions I think have a pair of jumpers that need to be correctly set for this.
The onboard 3.3V regulator is in the upper right corner of the board (as viewed when mounted in a typical case). It has a small heatsink on it and gets very hot. Does blowing a fan on that help?
USB does need to be enabled. That was a weird stumbling block for me back then. If you turn off USB then AGP doesn't work, the video will just go black as soon as Windows boots with drivers installed. That little tidbit was buried on Tyan's web site back then and not mentioned in the manual.
Back when I fought with this, my card was a Geforce2 MX AGP. I had corruption in 3D until I got it to run in AGP 1X. I did that with an older version of the VIA 4-in-1 driver which had the option to install in "Safe" mode. The effect on performance is negligible, like 0.1% or something. Unfortunately there's no 1X/2X option in the BIOS.
I was using nVidia v5.32 back then. Some later version driver (I think 6.31) fixed the corruption issue on it's own, but it was way slower so I didn't like that solution. In modern times I found that nVidia 8.05 and 12.41 are fast again, but I don't know if they still solve the corruption issue without putting VIA's driver in "safe" mode.