User:Infodriveway/Power Macintosh 7000 series

Power Macintosh 7100
The Power Macintosh 7100 was a mid-range Apple Macintosh personal computer that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from March 1994 to January 1996. The PowerMac 7100 was faster and more expandable than the Power Macintosh 6100, and was a part of the original Power Macintosh line along with the 6100 and the Power Macintosh 8100. It came in a slightly restyled Macintosh IIvx case, and received a speed increase to 80 MHz (from its original 66 MHz) in January 1995. When it was discontinued it was succeeded by two new models, the Power Macintosh 7200 and the Power Macintosh 7500.

A higher-priced audio-visual variant (the 7100AV) included a 2 MiB VRAM card with s-video in/out. Non-AV 7100s had a video card containing 1 MiB VRAM and no s-video in/out capability.

Codename Lawsuit
The Power Macintosh 7100's internal code name was "Carl Sagan", the in-joke being that the mid-range PowerMac 7100 would make Apple "billions and billions." Though the project name was strictly internal and never used in public marketing, when Sagan learned of this internal usage he sued Apple Computer to force the use of a different project name. Other models released conjointly were codenamed "Cold fusion" and "Piltdown Man", and he was displeased at being associated with what he considered pseudoscience. Though Sagan lost the suit, Apple engineers complied with his demands anyway, renaming the project "BHA" (for Butt-Head Astronomer). Sagan promptly sued Apple for libel over the new name, claiming that it subjected him to contempt and ridicule, but lost this lawsuit as well.

Power Macintosh 7200
The Power Macintosh 7200 (Codename: "Catalyst") is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's Power Macintosh series of Macintosh computers. It was introduced in August 1995 as a successor to the Power Macintosh 7100, and was discontinued in favor of the Power Macintosh 7300 in February 1997. The 90 MHz model was also sold in Japan as the Power Macintosh 7215, and the 120 MHz model with bundled server software as the Apple Workgroup Server 7250: additionally, it was available in Europe in an 8100-style case as the Power Macintosh 8200

The Power Macintosh 7200 represents the low end of the "second wave" of Power Macs, which replaced the NuBus of the Power Macintosh x1xx models with PCI. It was introduced at the same time as the Power Macintosh 8500 and the Power Macintosh 7500. With the latter, it also shares the then-new "Outrigger" case. Unlike the 7500, however, the 7200 does not have video input capabilities, and its CPU is soldered to the motherboard instead of on a daughterboard like the 7500, making it much harder to upgrade. At the time of its introduction, Apple promised an inexpensive logic board upgrade to the 7500, but due to high demand for the 7500, when the upgrade was finally made available, it was to the follow-on model, the Power Macintosh 7600 and cost $1600&mdash;not the inexpensive upgrade promised. It was launched at processor speeds of 75 and 90 MHz, and the slower model was replaced by a 120 MHz model in February 1996. The 120MHz model was also available in a "PC compatible" variant, which came with a PCI card that allowed the computer to run Microsoft Windows and other PC operating systems. The card featured a 100 MHz Pentium processor.

Power Macintosh 7500
The Power Macintosh 7500 was one of the first PCI capable Macs manufactured by Apple Computer. It was released alongside the Power Macintosh 7200, and the Power Macintosh 8500 in October 1995. The 7500 had a PowerPC 601 processor rated at 100 MHz that was replaceable via a daughtercard. It also featured full composite video and s-video input capability, but no output, as the 7500 was designed to be a video conferencing system, not a multimedia editing machine&mdash;this was the 8500's task. The 7500 and 7200 featured a unique swing open chassis called "Outrigger" that allowed for easy upgrades, as the entire motherboard was accessible to the user after the hinged drive sleds were opened.

There were two derivative models: the Power Macintosh 7600, was identical to the 7500 except for the CPU; the 7600 used a PowerPC 604 or 604e processor instead of the 601. The Power Macintosh 7300, was identical to the 7600, but lacked the video inputs found in both the 7500 and 7600.

In the 7500 and its derivatives, the main bus runs at 45MHz or 50MHz (set by the CPU daughtercard), and the cpu at integer or half-integer multiples of this speed. The bus is temperamental, and can show sensitivity to different kinds of RAM or of L2 cache. Some cpu upgrades attempt to drive the main bus at a faster clock-rate, but success is not assured.

Power Macintosh 7600
The Power Macintosh 7600 was a PowerPC 604 based desktop computer sold by Apple in three speeds (120MHz, 132MHz and 200MHz - the last model was not available in North America) between April 1996 and November 1997. The 7600 was essentially a Power Macintosh 7500 with a different CPU card, the change in model number occurring because of the move from the 7500's PPC601 to the 7600's PPC604. Like the 7500, it included advanced Audio-Video ports including RCA audio in and out, S-Video in, composite video in and standard Apple video ports. It was eventually replaced by the Power Macintosh 7300, one of the very few times that Apple updated a computer but gave it a lower model number - the reason is that the 7300 was a joint replacement for the 7600 and the Power Macintosh 7200.

The 7600 features the easy-access outrigger desktop case first introduced with the Power Macintosh 7200.

Power Macintosh 7300
The Power Macintosh 7300 (Codename: "Montana"; also sold with server software as the Apple Workgroup Server 7350) is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's Power Macintosh series of Macintosh computers. It was introduced at a processor speed of 180 or 200 MHz (in Europe and Asia, an additional 166 MHz configuration was available) in February 1997 alongside the Power Macintosh 8600 and the Power Macintosh 9600. It replaced both the Power Macintosh 7200 and the Power Macintosh 7600, and was itself discontinued in favor of the Power Macintosh G3 desktop model in November 1997.

The 7300 uses the same "Outrigger" case as its predecessors, but features an enhanced PowerPC 604e CPU. However, it no longer came with the video in capability the 7600 had, which possibly accounts for the fact that this is the only time that Apple used a lower model number for an upgraded model. Apart from that, the 7300 is more closely related to the 7600 than to the 7200, with features such as a processor daughtercard and interleaved RAM. The 7300/180 model was also available in a "PC compatible" configuration that included a 166 MHz Pentium processor with its own RAM (up to 64 MiB) on a PCI card which also provided a PC game port.