Athlon XP is not a EOL unit quite yet, not with VIA and nVidia still kicking new life into it with their latest chipsets.  nVidia being the more recent as you can see in Ryan’s review of their nForce2 Ultra 400Gb chipset.  The Tech Report’s review of this chipset came to many of the same conclusions,  it’s no longer the performance being the deciding factor of chipset purchases but in fact the feature set, which is something TR’s review reiterates.
“NVIDIA is positioning the Ultra 400Gb as a business platform, which makes sense given the chipset’s Serial ATA, RAID, GigE and firewall support. Business users aren’t likely to miss the SoundStorm APU, which NVIDIA still makes available in the original MCP-T for gaming and digital media platforms. Personally, I’d rather pair the Ultra 400Gb with a high-end 24-bit audio card for gaming and digital media applications, but that’s just me. What can I say? I’m a sucker for Serial ATA and RAID.”

Here are a couple more reviews from around the web:

Click Here to go to Chipsets  CHIPSETS