The Power Computing PowerBase models of Macintosh compatible clones hit the market in the late summer of 1996. Offering an excellent price/performance value these consumer orientated machines proved very popular and were hailed by most Mac orientated magazines as better value than Apple's own offerings which cost more and were less powerful. It was in large part due to the commercial success of Power Computing, the marketing hype that surrounded the company and the fact that Power Computing was going for Apple's jugular, that Apple pulled the plug on cloning - a controversial decision at the time.

The PowerBase 200 was the mid-range model of a three unit family that also hailed 180Mhz and 240Mhz models. It sported a 200Mhz 603e processor and a 256K L2 cache. The 603e processor was the low end PowerPC chip of the time and was also very low in power consumption.

The PowerBase's processor exits on a removable card and is thus replaceable with a faster processor. The 200 also shipped with 16MB of EDO (Extended Data Out) RAM. RAM was expandable to 160MB using 3 DIMM slots. The machine had 2MB of Graphics memory (expandable to 4MB for more colors at higher resolutions) and had a special chip for handling 3-D graphics acceleration. There are 3 full size PCI slots. The machine has a 8x CD ROM and a pokey 1.2GB IDE drive. One innovation the was the inclusion of a PS/2 keyboard port. You had a choice of cases for the PowerBase machines; a desktop model that had no free drive bays and a minitower that had two free, front accessible 5.25" drive bays.  

 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.