Well, the two boards came, and I'm pleasantly surprised. Sockets on the Dallas RTC chips, so if I kill one fixing it, I can replace it rather than toss the whole board! I have since seen pictures of an ECS 430VX board where they go all out and put sexy white sockets for the bios and RTC on the board, but mine only has the sexy white ISA slots (seriously, though, they're hot looking). I've never seen them in any color other than black. No one really pays attention to the bios chips any ways so the green and white color scheme is still valid 😀.
And I didn't look up the exact part number, but the tag ram chip on the board has a -15 on it, and it's fairly large. I think it's 15 bits. Even if it isn't, the coast modules have what look like tag ram on them as well. I should be good to go for >64mb of ram. Looking at what I've got, I'm going for 160MB of ram rather than the 256 I originally planned for so I have a spare system (using all 256 in a production box means no extra ram on the shelf).
I also have access to a 430HX board that only has an 8 bit tag ram module on it. I think I should do some comparison benchmarks between cached and uncached, and between 512kb and 256kb cached (the other board has a non-removable 512). It might take me a while to get to that though.
And this was my final retro system. I've got my PIII box, and now my P1 box. Not sure what to do now other than play with some of the stuff I've had on the shelf for years now. [/i]