That notebook sounds interesting!

I'm sure that soundchip has been covered on this forum. Do a search and see what you find.

With Soundcards, if your games use MIDI, then no, no need for a SB16 with Yamaha OPL. An AWE64 will be fine and give you a cleaner signal. A lot of games also have native support for the AWE synth.

Seems like you'll be going for a DOS rig?
In that case, the easiest Socket 7 route to me would be to build it around a Socket 7 ATX board. Doesn't even need to be Super 7 for your needs.
ATX is easier then AT because of all the extra little things AT comes with.
Also these tend to have lots of ISA slots and are one of the more flexible generations concerning CPU.

For a 233mhz system you'd be best suited with a TNT1 16mb (which the M64 is basically the same thing and is overkill) and voodoo1 4mb easily, part of 1996 is even a bit before V1 really hit the scene, as I believe that was 1997.

What games are the earliest and lastest games you want to use on the system? This will be more idea to what should be used.

As all opinions differ, if you want a good 98/99 end of the century build my build would be similar to:
Slot 1 440BX motherboard (not trying to crap on the S7 idea!)
P2 or early P3 Katmai cpu
TNT2 Ultra
Voodoo 2 SLI
SBLive! or Vortex 2 (w/daughter card)

I have a AWE64 Gold! in one machine and works great but can't play quake 2 sound while listening to MP3's! which kills it for me.

This machine would be primarily for early Win9x games that just won't run on XP or that run with less issues than on my Win98 rig.

The list of games I'm considering for this run from about 94-97 for the most part. Outlaws, Starfleet Academy, The Journeyman series. I do want to get into games of the era I missed, the Crusader series etc.

The machine would have full DOS support for the era via config file tweaking. I've already got the config.sys/autoexec.bat for DOS mode on the laptop with all drivers in place leaving me 624k free, so I'm good there. I can even cheat in places such as letting Windows load protected mode cd drivers and such if I really need to. When I add in the oakcdrom driver in real mode I'm down to about 597k free, which is still acceptable for the most part.

DOSBox will be handling my heavy DOS needs. This is just for a couple of games that are a pain in the ass, ie A Final Unity.

My Matrix is set at both extremes, it's just the middle I need to tweak. 99% of DOS games run in DosBox for me on my imac under XP, and modern games run XP native from the late 98 era up. The middle years, especially the early Win9x years are the games that give me headaches, surprisingly.

So, any suggestions on a good S7 board? I'm looking at either a p233mmx or K6 at 300. From what I've read here, that will give me the most flexibility for speed control via cache disabling. Video I'm set on my Stealth with a Voodoo 1, sound will be an AWE of some sort. The rest really is just whatever I can find.

I've been reading a lot of game magazine ultimate gaming rig articles from around 97/98. The chips above will give me a good buffer above the standard non-mmx p200s used in most of those systems.

If you're into 9x games, then maybe a Slot 1 or s370 would be easier then a s7. The main reason is that s7 is a little bit more work to get right. Going for a slot 1 or Socket 370 is just plain easy and should be cheap.
Also you'll get a working AGP slot, no "cacheable area" worries, larger harddrive support out of the box.
It's worth considering. Coppermine boards should be very easy to find these days and the coppermines themselves are dirt cheap.

Your only worry would be to find a board you like that also has ISA slots (if you want them).

The obvious drawback would of course be that these options are less flexible if you ever want to turn it into a pure DOS rig (harder to change CPU speed etc).

Yeah, I'm trying to mentally stay around where I was when I first played these games. Originally on a p75 and then on a p200mmx. I'm looking at erring on the side of the faster S7 chips just for that little extra oomph I never had as a kid.