The Power Macintosh 6500 family was introduced in the winter
of 1997. There are 4 models, coming in four speeds; 225Mhz,
250Mhz, 275Mhz and 300Mhz, all based on the 603e chip. The
machines came in the familiar Performa 6400 rounded
tower form factor, and other than the speed difference, distinguished
themselves from each other by varying hard drive sizes, amounts
of installed RAM, L2 cache size, bundled software, and in
the case of the 275Mhz machine, the inclusion of video out
hardware.
Considered consumer machines, they were aimed at the small
office and home market segments. You could purchase machines
with various software bundle options that appealed to the
different markets.
All 6500 machines have two 7" PCI slots, a Comm II slot,
TV tuner slot and a video in slot. The Comm slot is occupied
by a 33.6-Kbps Geoport modem (later models came with a 56Kbps
modem). Some 6500 models come with an internal Zip drive.
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To accelerate 3D and 2D graphics performance, the machines
came with ATI's 3D Rage II graphics chip. Installed VRAM is
2MB which is non-upgradeable. To get millions of colors at
higher resolutions you will have to install a ATI graphics
card with more VRAM. The system bus on the 6500s is 50Mhz,
which is a 10Mhz speed bump from the 6400.
The maximum RAM that can be installed is 128MB, into the
two DIMM slots. The logic board is easily accessible and slides
right out the back of the machine.
The machines were considered good, polished performers, but
also, over-priced compared to the Mac clone competition of
the time.
The 6500/275 came with 32MB or 48MB of RAM, 512K of L2 cache,
a 4 or 6GB hard drive and a 12X or 24X CD-ROM drive.
When the 6500's were released their processors
were considered non-upgradable. However companies have
figured out how to use the L2 cache slot for processor upgrades
and there are now several companies that have such L2 cache
slot upgrades available.
Below you will find the MacBench 4.0 results
for all of the current processor upgrades available for this
machine. Results marked in blue indicate that benchmark results
were done by us. All other 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
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rounded
tower form factor, and other than the speed difference, distinguished
themselves from each other by varying hard drive sizes, amounts
of installed RAM, L2 cache size, bundled software, and in
the case of the 275Mhz machine, the inclusion of video out
hardware. 
For Great Prices On Upgrades 