Power Macintosh 7200
The two computer models of the Power Macintosh 7200 (code name: "Catalyst") are personal computer company Apple and belong to the Power Macintosh series. They were presented as the successor to the predecessors 7100/66 (7100/66 AV) and 7100/80 (7100/80 AV) in 1995 in Cupertino ( USA ). The 7200/90 was sold in Japan with the same system profiles as the Power Macintosh 7215.
The 7200 series were Apple's smallest PCI computers and were available for around DM 2,400–2,700. Due to the low price as well as the technical equipment, the 7200 series were in the buyer's favor even before the current PowerPC Performas 5200 and 6200 in their own ranks. The Power Macintosh 7200 was intended as an inexpensive alternative to the Power Macintosh 7500 series, which was launched at the same time and appeared in the same housing. The Power Macintosh 8500, which was also released at the same time, and the somewhat older top-of-the-range Power Macintosh 9500 were located above these two computers. This more expensive 9500 had heralded the conversion of Apple from NuBus to PCI, with the 7200, 7500 and 8500 Apple now wanted make the new technology for Macintosh computers accessible to a wider market more cheaply. The company had to react to the market if it had actually already missed the development of PCI, which had long been part of the standard equipment of PCs at the time.
As the second Mac generation with a 601 CPU soldered to the motherboard , the 7200s had clock frequencies of 75–120 MHz, three PCI slots and four RAM slots, 1 MB VRAM and three free slots for expansion. The 7200 was only delivered in the USA in a desktop case, in Germany also in a mini tower case. The main memory slots were equipped with two modules of eight Mbytes each in 1995, so there were still two free for additional DIMMs. Although it was theoretically possible to display 16.7 million colors with a 21-inch resolution, the 7200 only managed the highest resolution with 16-bit color. This was due to a bug in the video logic. Without additionally ordered VRAM, the video logic could control at least 16-inch monitors with 32768 colors. The frame rate was always 75 Hz, which was in line with the times at the time.
Since some QuickDraw functions of the graphics card installed in the factory had been accelerated separately in the Power Macintosh 7200 , the display options provided also offered good performance. In addition, the 7200/90 with its bus clock of 45 MHz offered significantly more than the DOS and Windows 95 computers of that time with their standard value of 33 MHz, so that the throughput rate increased again with this model.
The Power Macintosh 7200s were shipped with the MacOS 7.5.2 operating system.
The 7200's housing, which can be opened quickly and easily, was praised at the time. A few simple steps are now all it takes to install plug-in cards and upgrade the video or main memory. Compared to its predecessor, the Power Mac 7100, one more space was created for a full-height 3.5-inch storage medium.
System profiles
Apple Power Macintosh 7200/75 (successor to the corresponding 7100)
- Construction time: August 1995 to March 1996
- Main processor: Motorola PPC 601
- Mass storage: SCSI hard drive, CD-ROM drive, 3.5 ″ drive for 1.44 MB diskettes, possibly Zip drive (2 × SCSI)
- Level II cache: up to 256 KB
- Bus rate: 37.5 MHz
- Clock rate: 75 MHz (can be increased to 120 MHz with a larger Motorola PPC 601)
- Max. RAM: 512 MB (4 × 168-pin DIMM memory banks)
- ROM size: 4 MB
- Graphics memory: 1024 KB, expandable up to 4 MB
- Graphics resolution: depending on the memory expansion
- Sound: 16-bit stereo system
Apple Power Macintosh 7200/90 (successor to the corresponding 7100)
- Construction time: August 1995 to May 1996
- Main processor: Motorola PPC 601
- Mass storage: SCSI hard drive, CD-ROM drive, 3.5 ″ drive for 1.44 MB diskettes, possibly Zip drive (2 × SCSI)
- Level II cache: up to 256 KB
- Bus rate: 45 MHz
- Clock rate: 90 MHz
- Max. RAM: 512 MB (4 × 168-pin DIMM memory banks)
- ROM size: 4 MB
- Graphics memory: 1024 KB, expandable with three DIMM memory banks
- Graphics resolution: depending on the memory expansion
- Sound: 16-bit stereo system