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, and you could purchase machines
with various software bundle options that would appeal 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). All machines were capable of video out. 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 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 clone competition
of the time.
The 6500/300 came with 64MB 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 clever 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 most of the processor upgrades available for this machine.
These results are what the individual manufactures publish
for their cards. In other words the speed trials were run
by the manufacturer. For an independent evaluation of these
cards check the Processor
Upgrade Page to see if we have results available. 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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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. 
For Great Prices On Upgrades 