So after a bunch of testing with 3 different Socket 3 PCI / ISA boards, this VIP board has so far come out the overall winner.
PCI speed is amazing, VLB speed is equal to other VLB boards running at 40Mhz fsb, and RAM speed is really good as well.... and it can take 1MB L2 cache.
The bad rap this board has gotten in the past is completely unwarranted from what I can tell... just have to install the 3rd fsb jumper to get the extra fsb settings.
PCI speed is over double the SIS based boards and the VIA based board I tried has nice, fast PCI, but the Voodoo 3 3000 will not work with it. Not sure if it is just an incompatibility or if it is a BIOS issue. I don't have any EEPROM chips that will work with this board so I am stuck waiting for some to arrive. It has a very early version BIOS from what I can tell so hopefully that will fix some things.
The other thing about these other boards is that the RAM speed plain sucks on the VIA board when at 40Mhz fsb.. like 1/2 the speed of when it is at 33Mhz.
The SIS boards are super finicky with the BIOS settings as far as RAM speed goes and give the fastest results when setting the "SETUP DEFAULTS"... Changing it to manual yields significantly lower results even when the timings are lowered to the best settings that are stable.... figure that out.
I do have a few more PCI/ISA boards to try out including a Mtech (Rise) R418W2 but it is currently not working at all due to damaged traces on the back of the board. Yay for scrap lots.