The 9600/233 was released in the winter of 1997. At that time Apple was attempting to come out with faster and less expensive computers to get the initiative back from the Mac clone manufacturers who had been beating the company in the price/performance equation. The 9600 made some gains in that direction, providing good performance at a lower price point than its predecessor. The 9600 sported a redesigned case that, though bulky, made installing upgrades a breeze. Aimed at the publishing professional, the 9600/233 has 6 PCI slots, came with the IMS Twin Turbo 128 2-D and 3-D video acceleration card with 4MB of VRAM, and a fast 4GB SCSI drive.

The 9600/233 sports a 604e PowerPC processor that resides on a replaceable daughter card. Unlike the 9600 machines that would follow it, the 9600/233 has standard L2 cache rather than the faster in-line cache that would come later. The size of the L2 cache is 512K and cannot be upgraded as it is soldered to the motherboard. The machine shipped with 32MB of RAM which is expandable to 768MB using the 12 DIMM slots. The CD-ROM is 12X. The machine has built-in Ethernet and internal Fast SCSI support.

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 scores.