Power Macintosh 5500
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The Power Macintosh 5500 – code-named "Phoenix" – was produced between February 1997 and early '98 and came with an IBM PowerPC 603ev processor operating at either 225, 250 and 275 MHz. The processor made use of a 32 KiB L1 cache and an optional 256 or 512 KiB L2 (the latter being available only on the 275 MHz model) cache operating at the stock 50 MHz bus speed.
It was originally produced for the educational market and is essentially an upgraded Power Macintosh 5400. These upgrades included a larger hard disk (2 GB was stock, but the 275 MHz models had 4 GB); a faster CD-ROM drive (12x in early models and 24x in the top-end); A better video card in the form of an accelerated ATI Rage IIc graphics card, containing 2 MiB of dedicated VRAM and allowing for a maximum screen resolution of 1024 × 768 pixels.
5500s came with optional multimedia PCI cards. In European models, these were an S-Video card and a Philips TV tuner card that also had an audio input. Black 5500s with this configuration were marketed as Director Editions in North America and Australasia and actually had the phrase printed on the case.
Like all other 5000 series PowerMacs, the 5500 is an All-In-One (AIO) computer – that is to say that the logic board, hard disk, floppy disk and CD-ROM drives, stereo speakers, monophonic microphone and 15" monitor are built into a single unit. This gives the computer the appearance of a television set – particularly when an aerial is connected to the built-in TV card. The 225 and 250 MHz models were produced in beige, whilst the rarer 275 MHz models were black.
The 5500 supports Macintosh System Software versions 7.5.5 through 9.1 - Mac OS X is not officially supported on this machine. However, it can be run with XPostFacto but this is not recommended, due to the 5500's lack of a G3 processor and RAM ceiling of 128 MiB. In the general case, 128 MiB of RAM is the minimum required for OS X to run (a G3 iMac can run OS X with this amount of RAM), but only on machines with a G3 processor.
