I got a used G3/375 Sonnet upgrade a few days ago and put it in my 7600/132 today and system profiler is reporting a G3 at 417mhz! I didn't know these could be overclocked.
My only experience is with the Crescendo Nubus G3 cards and the automatic configuration of their separate bus based upon host motherboard bus speed. I guess I shouldn't be speculating.
If cost weren't an issue, the memory bus would run at its own optimal speed, the CPU and the CPU's bus at their own, I/O on its own, et cetera. In many systems this happens, but it's just as easy to clock everything from one source so everything is some multiple, fraction, or combination. Sometimes synchronous busses can be more efficient when they're shared and the sharing is based on the synchronized access by alternating uses - that way the bus gets 100% usage.
Yeah, I might have been wrong about RAM. I was reading the specs on the old compact Macs, and I think even the II models, where the bus speed and CPU speed were the same. It didn't say about RAM (or I didn't remember).