Power Macintosh 5500
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| Power Macintosh 5500 | |
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| Manufacturer | Apple Computer |
| Introduced | February 17, 1997 |
| Discontinued | March 31, 1998 |
| Price | US$2000 - 2200 |
| CPU | PowerPC 603e, 225 - 275 MHz |
| RAM | 32 MB, expandable to 128 MB, 70 ns 168-pin DIMM |
| OS | System 7.5.5-Mac OS 9.1, or with G3 upgrade, up to Mac OS 9.2.2 |
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 KB L1 cache and an optional 256 or 512 KB 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 ATA hard disk (2 GB was stock, but the 275 MHz models had 4 GB); a faster SCSI 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 MB of dedicated VRAM and allowing for a maximum screen resolution of 1152 × 864 pixels.
5500s came with optional multimedia expansion cards, that connect via internal cables. 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 the 225 MHz version 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. Like the 5400 series, the 5500 has one PCI card slot. The 225 and 250 MHz models were produced in beige and black, whilst the rarer 275 MHz models were only black.
The 5500 supports 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 MB. In the general case, 128 MB 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.
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