I'm thinking the era of "great ALI chipsets" was more after they became ULi in the Athlon 64 era.

I had a ULi M1695 board (ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2) and it was unusual for the era in that it was a $90 motherboard with two full x16 slots. Even most of the nForce boards at the time had it set up as x8/x8. For like 10 minutes you could run SLI with it until nVidia deliberately crippled the GeForce drivers to not permit it, but I was using it with a pretty unambitious (but fanless-- remember fanless GPUs?) 7600GS.

They also did another chipset pairing that offered a PCI-Ex16 slot and a fairly compatible AGP-ish slot for people who had bought an expensive (which then meant $300 for a 256MB card) graphics card and wanted to carry it over. There were a few other boards using other chipsets (maybe VIA) that tried to glue together something like that, but the support was much more hit-or-miss.

OTOH, I did have an Aladdin IV ("TXpro") board back in the day, and it was nice because it supported 83MHz bus speeds when a "better" Intel TX board wouldn't. A K6-233 overclocked to 250 (3x83) was detectably faster than at 262 (3.5x75)