I had an Socket A Athlon 1700+ with an AGP Radeon 9800 pro on an Nforce2 platform to start off 2004. I upgraded the CPU to a Barton 2500+ in March and overclocked FSB to 400MHz. I wanted to keep the NForce 2 platform because the copper spidf out fit with my setup in a way that I loved, but wasn't completely thrilled with the build. That motherboard still works, but I had to recap it in 2020. I don't overclock it anymore.
After Halflife 2 came out, I felt like things were not as smooth as they should be, (and the video card was too hot) so I upgraded to a socket 939 Athlon64 3200+ with a PCIe Radeon 800xl on an ASUS Nforce 4 motherboard . It was an expensive upgrade at the time, I was disappointed that the Nforce 4 didn't have a copper spidf out for my receiver, so I added a turtle beach card in early 2005. The new motherboard also came with SATA, so that also helped me make the jump and I felt like quality of the games begged for the upgrade. The 939 motherboard & Radeon 800xl combo lasted for 5 years as my main system (with an upgrade to an Opteron 175 in early 2006). A lightning strike burned out one of the on board lan ports cards in 2007, but the board had dual jacks, so it was blessed to continue. Used it as my TV for a couple years with a usb2 ATSC tuner. Never took advantage of the SLI on the nforce 4 motherboard though. My kids got to use that Nforce 4 board from 2010 through 2016 when Window 10 finally delegated it to being unpleasant.
I always thought that AGP was a mess, with most of it's features missing the mark or the market, but I was gaming a lot at the time and I had a home rig and a LAN party rig and I went through a lot of equipment between 1999 and 2005. I stated with a Rage II Agp that I got for free, upgraded to a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP (giant boost in performance), Asus Riva TNT 2 (serviceable but finicky, probably because it was on an OC's Celeron 300a), tried an ATI Rage 128 pro for a minute, enjoyed my Geforce 3 ti200 with my early Athlon XP builds until it burned out, and the same with the Geforce 4 4400 (until it also burned out) before getting the 9800XP. That's why I was nervous about the VGA card heat, but honestly, smoking and cats and no air conditioning in the summer were likely contributing factors for the 200x video card deaths as well.