First system:
The winner of every single battle on socket A until now: Abit AN7 with Athlon thunderbird 1200C, 2 * 1 GB DDR 266 MHz at 2-2-2-5, Leadtek geforce 7600gt, integrated Sound storm and WD Raptor 150 GB hard drive.
The auxiliary power supply connector present on the board made possible to use a modern PSU: Corsair TX750 was tested successfully and ran 3dmark 2001 overnight with no BSOD’s.
However for testing all the systems I used an oldie but Goldie: Enermax EG701AX-VE; that PSU tamed even the 72W monster, the Thunderbird 1400C on all systems, including those without the auxiliary power connector. Take note that this PSU has independent regulated rails as there is no cumulative wattage on the 3.3V and 5V rails! This should be one of the best and most retro-friendly PSU I have ever used!
Memory should always be set to run in sync with the CPU for better performance. Note that running the memory out of sync at 400 MHz (effective) data rate will result in lowers score that running the memory at 266 MHz with the FSB:DRAM = 1:1.

Everest 5.50 correctly identifies all system components:

Legacy CPU-Z shows us many details including the timings used but not the command rate that was set to 1T!

Second system:
The first DDR platform for Athlon is represented by Abit KR7A – raid with Athlon 1200C, 2*1 GB DDR 266 MHz at 2-2-2-5, Leadtek geforce 7600gt, Creative live revision 0100 5.1 sound card and Samsung 160 GB hard drive. This motherboard took the 1200c with no complaints and correctly recognized the CPU.
Please note that I had to use geforce 7600gt because longer video cards such as geforce 7800gs do not fit in some of the motherboards (KT7A – RAID, KR7A – RAID) – either capacitors or memory clips are preventing the card to be inserted in the AGP slot. Also because it lacks integrated sound I used Creative live revision 0100 on both KR7A – raid and KT7A – raid.
Everest 5.50 - old but very reliable at detecting any piece of hardware - correctly reports every single details:

Meanwhile legacy CPU-Z decides to leave out the command rate setting again from its report, among other things!

Third system:
The first chipset for socket 462 to support 266 MHz FSB, the VIA KT133A, is present with the Abit KT7A – raid, 1200C; 3*512 Mb SDRAM made by Tanisys at 3-3-3-6 timings for a total of 1.5gb. Note that it is impossible to use 3 double sided SDRAM dims with low timings so I was forced to use CAS 3 in order to obtain stability; also I had to set the Delay DRAM read latch to 1.5ns in order for the system to pass Memtest; again the video card is the Leadtek geforce 7600gt, the sound card is the Creative live revision 0100 5.1 and for storage I used a Seagate 120 GB hard drive. All details regarding the settings required to obtain stability on KT7A – raid and the impact they have on performance are available on page 18 of this topic.

Everest again shows us all the details, including identifying the correct southbridge as the 686B - as seen in screenshot number 3:
A note on the memory: Tanysis modules are the only ones that passed memtest and achieved system stability!

Monitor used throughout all socket 462 tests: Eizo S2100 with a maximum resolution of 1600*1200.
I had to also made several modifications to the tests because Thunderbird does not have SSE; I will detailed them one by one but for now I must mention that Fraps 3.4.7 can not be used as it requires SSE so I used version 1.9D. MSI afterburner 4.30 runs just fine without SSE, so does IrfanView, Everest 5.50 and many other programs but others do not!
Drivers used are:
1. VIA platform driver version 4.56v
2. nforce driver version 5.10
3. Nvidia graphic driver version 93.71
4. default creative live driver installed by Windows XP.
Operating system: Windows XP SP3 with no updates.

The results will always be in the following order:
1. KT7A – RAID/VIA KT133A - for easier reading I selected the Windows XP default Luna theme.
2. KR7A – RAID/VIA KT266A - for easier reading I selected the Windows XP Luna theme with the XP background.
3. AN7/nforce2 ultra 400 - for easier reading I selected my favorite XP theme: Royal!

1. As always the first test is CODE CREATURES PRO, a DIRECTX 8.1 benchmark that cannot stress too much the geforce 7600gt but it is seriously limited by the CPU!
We start at default resolution and settings which is 1024*768 NO AA and no sound:
KT7A-RAID
KR7A-RAID
AN7

2. We follow up on the first test by adding sound to the CODE CREATURES PRO, whilst keeping the same default graphical settings:

3. We add AA, the only graphical setting you can alter, besides the resolution, in the Code creature pro benchmark:

4. We test at the same 1024*768 resolution, max settings but we add sound this time:

5. We increase the resolution to 1280*1024 with AA=4X but without sound!
Same order:
Abit KT7A-RAID/VIA KT133A
Abit KR7A-RAID/VIA KT266A
Abit AN7/nforce2 ultra

6. We stay at the same 1280*1024 resolution and put sound into the mix

7. We increase one more time to the 1600*1200 - the "king of resolutions" in the retro world - no sound this time:

8. And the final and most demanding settings in the Code creatures: 1600*1200, AA=4x, sound enabled:
VIA KT133A
VIA KT266A
NFORCE2 ULTRA

Code creatures pro results are not very encouraging for the one and only SDRAM chipset: VIA KT133A is always last and the difference between it and the the other 2 chipsets in the 4 tests done with sound is huge!!
The distance between VIA KTA266A and nforce2 ultra is always around 5%, just within the margin of error, so no clear winner here!

9. The next benchmark is Aquamark3, a DirectX 9.0 test that also integrates sound, so therefore is a good candidate to see how the performance stacks up relative to the audio chipset used - Creative live vs sound storm - and if some chipset penalizes audio performance or not - KT133A vs KT266A.
First is the default resolution and settings: 1024*768, no sound, no AA.
Abit KT7A-RAID

Abit KR7A-RAID: