Beside me are two IIci Macs, both with 80MB of RAM, AsantéFAST NuBus NICs and Radius/Apple 24X and 24AC video cards, and running OS 7.6.1. One has a DayStar '030/50MHz, and the other a DayStar 'LC040/33MHz. Without swapping either HDD from one to the other, because I don't care to do so, because they need different CPU control panels, and because the installations were made with the relevant CPUs in place to get any different software requirements installed on their HDDs, I just ran some crude tests on them with DayStar's Speedometer 4.0.2.

The '030 takes 2'45" to get to the desktop. The '040 takes 1'30". The benchmark mix (10 tests) gives averages of 0.76 and 1.31 relative to a (bog-standard?) Quadra 605. The 8-bit colour benchmarks (both Macs have Portrait Displays at 256-greys) are 0.43 and 0.99.

Without labouring the point further, there seems to be a clear advantage to the '040, even without an FPU, in line with your own observations.

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