So I've had time to test the socket 7 board at 550Mhz all the way down to 166Mhz, with and without L1 (L2 no effect). My benchmark for 386 performance is speedsys and Wing Commander 1. I could not get speedsys scores less than 33. I think WC wants this to be between 8-10. What I like about this board is it has an ISA slot, a fast cpu, and fast onboard video due to it being on the AGP bus. So for now this board will go into storage. I'm definitely not getting rid of it! I just don't have any room for more than one active DOS machine.
The other board (with the 440LX and Celeron 333) is pretty interesting too. It has nice onboard AGP too--ATI Video Xpression+ Mach64VT4 with 2MB. Still quite fast. In fact, it's hard to tell between it and the socket 7 board in the most demanding games I've tried (System Shock and Descent 2), but it does downclock much slower (in fact, too slow--speedsys is 4.43) and has an AGP slot and 2x ISA slots. Still not good enough to dethrone my Packard Bell Pentium 120 as main DOS rig. I think before I retire this one I will run some VGA benchmarks on it with all of my AGP cards.
The Packard Bell is the best compromise of the three. I've overclocked it to 133Mhz, it has a PCI slot for my Voodoo3, and 2x ISA slots. It is a *little* sluggish with System Shock and Descent 2 and very sluggish with Cybermage, but everything else I have plays great. And Setmul drops its speed to about 8.5--perfect for the Wing Commanders.
I really appreciate everyone's help and feedback. You are a great community and I feel blessed to be a part of it.
PS--on both of these boards, I pulled them from the HP micro towers and tossed the cases. They are horrible to work in--having to disassemble everything just to get to something simple. I prefer to use my own cases. 😀
Cheers!