Yup.. Nvidia made some really bad chipsets! I remember them well. And what about when the Athlon with the Slot A just came out. And we all built computers with the FIC SD11 motherboard? No one told us that FIC rushed it to market with a prototype 4-layer board! DOH! Really wasn't helping us custom PC builder's reputation with low quality like that.. Asus on the other hand.. I've continue to use their products ever since ABIT failed because of the capacitor scandal! That took them down, so sad.. I liked ABIT's products.Both were producing "bargain" chipsets for Intel, Cyrix and AMD CPU's. Both also produced video chips, SiS's video (often used onboard) was "adequate" for non-gaming use, and their drivers weren't too bad, that may be what you were thinking of. Their North Bridge and South Bridge chips were not great.
I can't remember the vendor, but they used an SiS "RAID" chip on one of their boards, so you had I think it was an Intel southbridge, but if you wanted to use RAID, you had to use the SiS controller, which had way lower throughput and it was of course software RAID and the drivers were total sketch (the arrays would just randomly break and have to rebuild, lol). That was before HighPoint kind of became the defacto standard (remember Promise?) and Adaptec wasn't really in the consumer space, they were still really focusing on SCSI.
SiS, ALi and VIA were the reason AMD CPU's (and to a lesser extent Cyrix, since they were always viewed as budget) didn't have the same reputation for robustness and stability that Intel enjoyed, who always produced their own chipsets, though of course that didn't stop some vendors from producing lower priced boards using cheaper chipsets. AMD of course famously stopped producing their own chipsets after Slot A. I had an ASUS Slot A board with an AMD chipset kicking around here for a long time. AMD's own chipsets were excellent.
Of course we later saw both ATI (before AMD bought them) and NVidia produce chipsets as well, which helped AMD to some extent. Once the Northbridge was rolled into the CPU die, things got a lot better.
NVidia famously produced a chipset(s?) that had a crazy high rate of failure (integrated video, which made it popular) that affected all major brands, including Apple. And, that impacted both AMD and Intel CPU's, IIRC.
But Asus hasn't been bad either!
I can see why AMD bought out ATI and began making their own chipsets! They had to, so they could become reliable. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!!