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PowerMac 8600/300 Facts at a Glance
- Processor: 604e, 300MHz
- Bus Speed: 50 MHz
- L2 Cache: 1MB In-line (100MHz)
- Installed RAM:32MB (Max 1 GB*)
- RAM Slots: 8, 168-pin DIMM
- Min RAM Speed: 70 ns
- Installed VRAM: 2MB (Max 4 MB)
- Drive: 4GB SCSI
- Internal Fast SCSI up to 10MBps
- CD Drive: 24X
- Network: On-board AAUI and 10baseT
- Slots: 3PCI
- Drive Bays: 2 (5.25") (Zip drive occupies one)
- Supported MacOS: 7.6.1 - 9.x
- Introduced: 8/5/97
- Discontinued: 2/98
- Original Price: $3,700
Notes:
- 128MB DIMMs can be used, but have not been tested
- Internal Zip Drive
- Video in/out capable
- In-line cache
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January 16, 2001
The 8600/300 was put on the market in the late summer of
1997. It sported two innovations related to processor performance.
The first was a reworking of the Processor itself, the venerable
604e, shrinking it down in size. This reengineered chip was
the short-lived Mach 5 version of the 604e. Shrinking the
chip down substantially made is possible to run it at higher
clock speeds. To take advantage of these higher clock speeds
however another innovation was necessary in the L2 cache structure
- so that the processor would get data fast enough. To achieve
this Apple used an in-line cache scheme with a direct 100Mhz
bus between the L2 cache and the processor (twice the system
bus speed). This in-line cache scheme appeared only on the
high end 8600 and 9600 machines and also some UMAX clones.
It died out however soon after the appearance of the G3 machines,
as did 604e Mach 5 processor based machines themselves.
The processor and cache sit on a separate daughter card and
thus are easily replaced with any of the many new G3/G4 upgrades
made for this machine. The 8600/300 has 3 PCI slots, 8 RAM
DIMM slots, built-in Ethernet and internal Fast SCSI support.
It came with 32MB of RAM, 2MB of Video RAM (expandable the
4MB for more colors at higher resolution) and 1MB of in-line
cache. For drives, the machine has a 4GB SCSI hard drive,
24X CD-ROM drive and an internal Zip drive. The 8600 is also
video in/out capable. Getting to the machine's upgrade slots
is very easy.
The 8600/300 was considered a good solid machine,
and its innovations were lauded. However, at the time clone
makers were already previewing G3 based machines and certain
Mac publications, while praising the 8600 highly, suggested
you give them a pass and wait for the G3 clones to arrive.
It is not hard to see why, given this kind of advice from
many influential Mac sources, that Apple pulled the plug on
cloning only a short while later.
Below you will find the MacBench 4.0 results for the current
processor upgrades available for this machine. Results marked
in blue indicate that benchmark results were done by us. All
other processor card results were provided by the upgrade
manufacturer. The bar graphs below express results as a percentage
of improvement over the base machine, which receives a score
of 100%. Further down the page you will find a table with
the actual MacBench score.
** Note that MacBench does not take advantage
of the Velocity Engine (AltiVec instructions) of the G4. For
AltiVec accelerated applications
you can see a 1.4 to 4 times performance improvement over
the G3, depending on the application and the functions you
are trying to perform.
For G4 Application specific scores - Click
Here
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