Tier 5: radeon 8500 and lower/geforce4 and lower: these cards should be considered for your Windows 98 system and not for XP. No recommendation here as the performance is too low. You really need a DirectX 9 card if you want to cover the 2000 – 2004 era.
Where are the rest? Well, there are dozens of models that I have not tested because I do not have them. Because I can not recommend something that I did not used personally and I know is compatible and good they do not appear at all in my recommendations. However I welcome any input from colleagues that have other cards and tested them on socket 462.

Personally my opinion - once you get to "tier 4" it makes more sense to look into really low end newer cards. All the "garbage" like that 6600, even 6600LE, etc. Or DDR2 versions of better cards like 7300GT, may be even 7600GS/GT, 6800LE, etc. Assuming the they are cheap (sometimes they are). Etc, etc. Basically whatever newer is possible to find for cheap. Why? This will perform comparably or better to older mid-range cards, will be cheaper, usually - cooler and easier to replace as this tend to be super common from all the office or "multimedia" systems.

Obviously within context of this discussion - older cards like GF FX or radeon 9nnn are great for older, w98 stuff.

I also can not stress enough how great 7300GT GDDR3 is - it is very similar in performance to 6600GT and can often be seen for really low price like $5-15, because people just see "300" and assume it is junk (like all previous <600 cards are). Well, it is not and being G73 it also brings all the new features of 7 series, which can make it even preferable to 6600GT.

Athlon XP makes sense for two purposes
- Windows 98 -> you need GeForce 4 or FX
- Windows XP -> you get 7xxx series card depending on your budget

Those tiers are not very meaningful as they lead to suboptimal systems.

AlexZ wrote on Yesterday, 19:38:

Athlon XP makes sense for two purposes
- Windows 98 -> you need GeForce 4 or FX
- Windows XP -> you get 7xxx series card depending on your budget

I kind of agree, but also with how hard some of this cards are to get IMO it is not that binary. Every card is worth looking into and some GF6 cards are not bad at all. In fact some of them are interesting because of native AGP and older fabrication process which should not be affected by bumpgate, and may be more reliable.

What does not make sense, IMO, is going below GF6 for winXP - this ends up being too slow, or too expensive in extreme cases like high end radeons. And FX series have noting at all to offer here.

AlexZ wrote on Yesterday, 19:38:

Athlon XP makes sense for two purposes - Windows 98 -> you need GeForce 4 or FX - Windows XP -> you get 7xxx series card dependi […]
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Athlon XP makes sense for two purposes
- Windows 98 -> you need GeForce 4 or FX
- Windows XP -> you get 7xxx series card depending on your budget

Those tiers are not very meaningful as they lead to suboptimal systems.

It is not that simple, otherwise we would not have the myriad of Athlon XP configurations on the forum! Also today you must take into account the price of each component, I am sure not everyone is going to spend 100 USD on a high end AGP card!

STORAGE:
Before presenting the variants I will say a few things!
With regards to SSD’s I had mixed experiences: on Abit AN7/NF7 – S 2.0 I could used an Intel SSD connected to the silicon image 3112 controller but not a Kingston/Plextor/Adata one; on any other board I could not use a SSD: for example on NF7 – S2G with native SATA controller integrated into the Southbridge as soon as I connected a SSD the system froze on startup, on Abit AT7 – MAX 2 with Marvell 8030 controller no SSD worked; on KR7A – 133R as soon as I connected a SSD with a SATA to PATA adapter the system refused to get over IDE devices detection. I will not recommend a SSD as I believe the problems I encountered far outweigh the benefits – no noise, very low access time.
Motherboards with a VIA chipset and the VT8237 Southbridge support only SATA 1 drives or SATA 2 drives jumpered to SATA 1; on older boards I encountered even more issues: only HDD’s with a certain capacity would work, using an adapter with large drives resulted in a system freeze.
The best option would be a SATA hard drive connected to the SATA port or to the IDE port using an adapter (if possible) - I got 2 SATA to IDE adapters and both work just fine an any socket 462 board. Be aware that there is a limit on the capacity! For example Abit AN7 has a 500 GB limit and the older the board the lower the limit!
Another option is to use a PCI SATA controller from Promise for example. Because there are so many of them I can not make a recommendation about any of them! I will talk strictly about what you can use with the onboard SATA/IDE.