[chadaustin]

I did a bunch of media and software development back then so RAM helped a lot. Why 640? Not sure. My particular board could have gone up to 768. I did some googling and found some boards that maxed out at 1 GB.

That was a weird time in computing. Things were getting fast and big quickly (not that many years later, I built a dual-socket Xeon at 2.8 GHz, and before that my brother had a dual socket P3 at 700 MHz.) but all the expansion boards were so special-purpose. I remember going out of my way to pick a board with something like seven expansion slots.

But I think your question about why the author said 640 is fair! Maybe they had a machine like mine around then. Or maybe it’s something NVIDIA was designing around?