Mac OS Supported: 7.5.5, 7.6.1, 8.0, 8.1, 8.5, 9.0
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. All machines were capable of
video out.
To accelerate 3D and 2D graphics performance, the machines
came with ATI's 3D Rage II graphics chip. Installed VRAM is
2MB which is not 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
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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.
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The 6500/225 came with 32MB of RAM, 265K of L2 cache, a 2
or 3GB hard drive and a 12X 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 were several companies that had such L2
cache slot upgrades available. Currently only Sonnet carries
cache slot upgrades, Newer having discontinued theirs and
Vimage having gone out of business.
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 