All of my VIA experience is with Asus CUV4X and TUV4X boards using VIA 294X and 294T chipsets.
I bought the CUV4X when it was relatively new. The BIOS had issues. The VIA drivers had issues. Within a few months, fixes were released and my PC finally performed as well as it should have.
I did have trouble installing a SoundBlaster 512 PCI.
The nice thing about the CUV4X was that unlike any of the Intel boards from the same time frame: support for the much later 1GHz P3, up to 1.5GB of RAM and fully functional AGPx4 support.
Despite the initial teething troubles and the issues with Creative products, I saw good prices for P3 1.2GHz Tualatins and TUV4X motherboards that supported them. The TUV4X completely rejected the SoundBlaster Live! card. I ended up with Turtle-Beach Santa Cruz sound cards.
WindowsXP caused some issues, so bios and chipset driver changes were provided almost as fast as the issues were reported.
I still have two CUV4X P3 1GHz and two TUV4X P3T 1.2GHz PCs in operation. They play every game presently on the market, but in modern sims like AH2 and LOMAC, the quality settings have to be mid-range or lower. I have been so happy with the way these PCs perform that I keep delaying buying new hardware (which has the benefit of ensuring I will see a huge leap in performance when I finally do).
Based on my experience, I would not have a problem buying a VIA motherboard. In fact, having read some online reviews and discussions by people trouble-shooting their hardware, I am leaning toward buying AMD CPU rather than Intel for the first time with Asus A8V-E Deluxe motherboards.
