My friend had a chaintech video card. It worked fine. You only typically run into problems with video cards with really cheap brands, because even the fairly inexpensive ones can follow a reference design without screwing up. With motherboards, its not so simple. Designs vary radically. So with graphics it usually comes down to price and the extras, which I've never cared about personally. If I want to OC my GPU a ton, I don't buy a more expensive model of the same one, I get a cooling kit like the Vantec Iceberq4 CCB-A4P Pro. Err, or one of the smaller variants, if it doesn't fit your card.
As far as BIOS goes, if you mean the BIOS on a mainboard, that's not really an issue. Whatever the motherboard uses, it uses.
With the nForce 2, the reason why I stressed getting one (like the abit fivefeet mentioned, although only Revision 2, or the asus deluxe model) with Sound Storm was not just because the audio is better "quality". What I've saying it is makes your computer perform better in applications that use hardware acceleration (like games). It even gives you a higher FPS in games than an Audigy 2! In the end it doesn't matter, but if you're going for cheap don't bother buying a SB live either. Onboard works fine.
