I like most of Intel's and NVIDIA's chipsets. And once you get into K8 territory, AMD's chipsets get good too. This hardware usually "just works" and it's also usually quite fast.
VIA chipsets are trouble when you are looking at Socket 7 through Socket A. K7 chipsets will at at best be slow compared to nForce 2. Once you get into the K8 era, VIA's stuff does become pretty good, but that's probably because AMD put a big part of the northbridge hardware into the CPU. Their southbridge chips are rather lame though and weren't kept up to date, and they still have slow PATA that you can literally feel if you try taking the same drive across platforms.
The AGP on VIA chipsets from the Socket 7 and Slot 1 days is so bad that it is a lost cause IMO. Put a Voodoo3/5 on there and save yourself headaches. There used to be websites with user reports on which cards did and didn't work on these boards. Most cards won't work 100% reliably. VIA AGP drivers and some graphics card drivers would reprogram the chipset to run in AGP 1x mode without sideband to try to make cards work, which is probably what Amigaz has going on.
And then there were also the wonderful PCI problems on those Super 7 / Slot 1 boards too! 😁
But I do like their K8 stuff. It works. The PATA is still slow because of their lacking southbridge chips though.
There are some not so great chipsets from every company though. I had problems with nForce4's NIC and PCI hardware. AMD has had poor SATA and USB performance. And some of the old Intel chipsets from the 486, Pentium and Pentium Pro days do have lots of quirks.