Introduced in the summer of 1997, the Twentieth Anniversary
Macintosh (TAM) was meant to showcase the Macintosh on the
milestone of its existence. Sleek elegant, and futuristic,
the machine was packed with home entertainment features including;
TV and FM radio tuners, a tremendous Bose Acoustimass sound
system complete with a hefty sub-woofer, and S-video in -
allowing you to connect VCRs and camcorders. The TAM was considered
to be a collectors item and only a little over 10,000 of the
machines were ever produced. However, probably due to the
initial price tag of the TAM, they did not sell all that well
and Apple had to reduce the price from $7,500 to around $2,000
to clear out the remaining inventory of the machines.
The TAM stands upright and has a 800 x 600 SVGA Flat Panel
Active Matrix Display (12.1" Diagonal) capable of 16-bit
color. Inside the main unit is a 603e processor running at
250Mhz with a 50Mhz system bus.
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For graphics the machine has the ATI Rage II 64-bit 3D multimedia
& graphics chip and 2MB of video SGRAM making graphics
on the machine, at the time of its release, quite impressive.
The logic board has two DIMM slots and RAM can be expanded
up to 128MB using either EDO RAM or fast-page mode DIMMs.
There is one PCI slot and a Comm II slot. The machine shipped
with 256K L2 cache which can be expanded up to 1MB. Increasing
the Cache to 1MB should improve processor performance
by about 25%. A front loading CD ROM drive, side loading floppy
drive and 2GB ATA hard drive round out the machines attributes.
The main unit of the TAM was connected to the base unit,
which also housed the computers power supply, by a thick cable.
It is recommended for best results that you place the base
unit on the floor where it can pound out its booming low notes
to its hearts content.
The TAM unfortunate was conceptualized and engineered in
the pre Amelio era at Apple when quality control was not what
it should have been. As a result many of the TAMs suffer from
a buzzing from one of the speakers and Apple, as of the date
this was written, has not yet entirely figured out what is
causing it.
The processor of the TAM is soldered to the logic board and
so is not removable. However some manufacturers have processor
upgrades that plug into the L2 cache slot of the computer
and wrest control from the truly sluggish 603e, giving you
close to modern type processor performance.
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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