See anything incorrect? Let Jeff know and it'll be fixed ASAP!

• 200, 240mhz PowerPC 603e Processor (180, 200 discontinued)
  • Bus speed of 40mhz on all three systems
  • CPU is on a daughtercard and is upgradable (note: only to 603e chips..possibly G3)
  • No upgrades currently available
• 16mb EDO RAM (minimum)
  • Memory cannot be interleaved for better performance
  • 3 DIMM slots, 168pin EDO DIMMs
• 1.2gb IDE hard disk (minimum)
• 12x CD-ROM Drive
• 256k Level-2 cache
• DRAM-based built in video w/ 2mb VRAM
• 3D Video acceleration (way cool!)
• 3 PCI slots
• Low-profile (see picture) or minitower case
• 1-3 Drive bays (depending on configuration and case)
• Extended Keyboard and Mouse
• $1200+ in bundled software

MacOS 8, FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0, FWB CD-ROM Toolkit 2.06, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Nisus Writer 4.1 (30-day trial), Nisus Mail Keeper 1.5 & Nisus QUED/M 3.0 (90-day trials), ClarisWorks 4.0, Now Up-To-Date & Now Contact 3.6, Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia CD, Club KidSoft CD, Bungie's Weekend Warrior 3D Game CD, 250 Bitstream Type 1 & TrueType* fonts, FWB Hard Disk Toolkit PE, FWB CD-ROM Toolkit, America Online (Trial), Compuserve (Trial)

• Darrin from Colorado provides this good news:
  • After playing phone hockey with around seven different mail order places, I found that Club Mac had the PowerBase 180 LP that I wanted. After the initial start-up chime I immediately became aware of the most agrivating high pitched whine that I had ever heard. After minutes of sticking my head everywhere and fiddling with sliders and check boxes, I came the the conclusion that it was a hardware problem. The whine was coming from the internal speaker and the external speaker jack. Already I was doubting myself for straying from Apple pastures. However, a quick call to PowerCC converted me back to a true Power believer. They immediately sent me a new mother board and got me in contact with a repair man that they would pay to come to my house and install the board. What service! The only noise from my computer now is from the slightly too loud fan.
  • Ohh, and for those of you considering buying a system that doesn't have SRS surround sound, turn back before its too late. It is a truely revolutionary technology that has to be heard to be believed. This comes from someone who uses Definative Technology BP2000 speakers as a standard to shoot for ;>
• Jeff Saxe is our first PowerBase 200 reporter. Here's the scoop!
  • The assembly / testing / burnout page included with the computer had a date of 11/9/96, which was this past *Saturday*, and it arrived Monday by FedEx. So they must have the crews working overtime shipping these puppies.
  • I have a Sony 17SF-II monitor, which has a PC-style VGA connector on the end but comes with a small adapter to give it a Mac DB-15 connector. But this was unnecessary since the PowerBase itself has both connectors on the back! How nice. They include a decent keyboard (with a too-short-to-reach-the-floor, captive ADB cord, dang it) and mouse, but strangely there are PS/2-style mouse and keyboard ports, I guess in case you have a PC peripheral you really prefer. These are well supported -- there's a control panel called PC Input with which you can map the second mouse button and the Alt / Win95 keys to useful Mac counterparts.
  • Contrary to the rather alarming news in Newer Tech's GURU (at least the version I looked at, 2.1.1), the video circuitry *does not* seem to be hampered by a bandwidth limitation. GURU says that at 800x600 resolution and easy-to-read, non-flickery 75Hz, the video can not produce millions of colors from the 2MB standard EDO DRAM that comes installed -- you'd need to give it 4MB or change the DRAM to SGRAM or SDRAM (whatever those are). I didn't specifically test 800x600, but the Mac standard of 832x624 at 75 Hz works perfectly, with millions of beautiful colors. And I pushed it up to 1024x768 at 75Hz, and that works fine too (with thousands of colors). My monitor doesn't support anything higher, but the video card appears to. Perhaps this GURU is based on pre-release specs, or on some other Power Computer model's video circuitry. (Newer Tech: I'll be happy to try any other modes you like and tell you the results...)
  • The video is FAST! As described by your PB180 writers, it came with a 2D-savvy but 3D-clueless ATI Graphics Accelerator driver, plus a mail-in card promising that ATI will send an updated driver when it's ready. I imagine I'll be downloading it from PowerWatch before the floppy hits my mailbox!! <JEFF GRINS>Then I'll run some tests (a couple of rendered games, or the Gerbils! demo of QD3D) and tell you how much it improves things.
  • I installed the Apple Telecom software that came in the Apple Extras folder on the disk, and the GeoPort Telecom Adapter (original version) that my old job gave me works perfectly as a speakerphone. Tonight I'll install the 3.0 Express Modem and try using it as a data modem.
  • Speech recognition (version 1.4.1) is very responsive -- almost instantly after you speak a name, it opens or runs. Unfortunately, I was used to the old version from my Quadra 840AV, in which you could speak the name of any menu item in any application; in this version, Apple appears to have improved the reliability and responsiveness by reducing the number of things it can understand. Please, Apple, give us real-time dictation of spoken English text!
  • Oh, the built-in speaker is truly wimpy. We have some Quadra 950's here at work, and those babies can pump out the music! The PowerBase either has a small speaker or a weak amplifier, even with the Sound Output and Alert volumes both turned up to maximum. But I plugged in some headphones and the sound is great -- the SRS circuit does affect the headphone output. Good thing I'd already planned to buy some outboard powered speakers.
  • All in all I'm very happy.
    
• Chris Deery got his PowerBase 180 too, and he has some comments:
  • The speakers on the 15" monitor are pretty tinny, so I think I could have spent my money better on a monitor and separate speakers.
  • The keyboard is the standard PowerComputing Ultra-flimsy model. I will probably swap it with my old keyboard. Kudos to Power Computing however, for including a keyboard and mouse.
  • I think the system is pretty loud. I have the low-profile desktop case, and I regret not getting the tower case so I could hide the thing under my desk, where it would be quieter.
  • Despite the noise and the keyboard, I am thrilled with the machine! The 8X CD-ROM really makes CD's fly, and everything worked right out of the box. There is a note with a reply card included in the box asking that you register to get a newer 3-D software accelerator, so they are apparently still tweaking the system to make it even faster.
  • It came with system 7.5.3 update 2 installed as the system, and I have been using the thing heavily for two days now without a single crash. Of course I haven't finished loading it up with all of my favorite extensions...
    
• David Theil send in some preliminary MacBench scores and some reviews:
  • Machine tested: PB180 with 32Meg Ram, 2 Meg VRAM under system 7.5.5, straight out of the box except for the 7.5.5 update.
    • Processor 28.59
    • FPU 28.10
    • disk mix 32.95 (I have the 2Gig SCSI, notthe 1.2 gig IDE)
    • publishing disk mix 14.4
  • Note: Matt Hafner has the 1.2gb IDE drive:
    • disk mix: 26.36
    • pub. disk max: 14.63
    • graphics 35.30
    • publishing graphics 27.50
    • cd-rom not performed; I do not own the MacBench test CD-ROM
  • Notes: (excuse his spelling :-) )
  • no receipt. The closest thing to a packing list was a configuration log. I have no idea what I actullay paid!
  • This has a quick feel to it. Every little thing (find file, for instance) is noticibly much faster than my 7500/100 with a 512k L2 at work.
  • the four foot pads in my minitower are not quite all the same height. If my desk on my desk, not at all on a flatter able, though even there it does not seem that the whole foot contacts at once. it's highest clearence on my supposedly flat table is still only 1 mm, so it is not bad. On my desk I have shimmed it with an ordinary sheet of paper folded three times (8 thicknesses.)
  • There are all sorts of intresting tidbits in the manual I was not aware of. There is only on SCSI bus on the PB. My 7500 has both an internal and an external for 14 potentially free adresses total (the mother board takes up an adress on each bus, of course!). That leaves me with 5 slots open on myt PB with my config of only one internal drive, the CDROM and the mother board occupying three of the eight. There is one IDE connector internally, so I can hook up six devices if one is IDE. The floppy drive is not mentioned as occupying a SCSI address! This is no omission. HDTOolkit does not see it. It must be IDE. A very smart thing to do with what is an almost useless I/O device that is slow anyway. Ed note: Floppy drives are not IDE nor SCSI.
  • Getting into the guts is to add RAM or whatever is a piece o' cake! Big thumbscrews on the back allow the the cabinet to slide off amd then you lay it on it's side as if it were a desktop; apparently there is some sort of secondary case withing to allow this. Then it is just like a desktop. Anyone who has installed RAM or cards in a Quadra or 8500 will understand why this is great! I have not acutally opend it up, so there could be something unexpected, but it looks straightforward inthe excellent manula. The one minor drawback is all of the 9 pin connectors in the rear go in "sideways" (flat side not up) compared to standard apple. No biggee. There are easy to read icons in black silk screen next to each port and the connectors are idiot proof as usual.
  • The ports and connectors do not have that solid "I am attached to metal" fell. I bet they are just soldered onto the board as in other models. This saves $$ but be a little careful with them! While we are talking about the sterotypically "fragile" PowerComputing boxes, I should add that the tower as a whole has a fairly solid feel to it.
  • My Platinum modem also cannot update to 33.6 . I had actually hoped to hear from Janet Vito on PowerWatch about this before my machine shipped. Oh well. I only took the modem bundle because it *was* the same as street price and I figured "why not throw PC another bone, plus it will save me one more phone call to MacMall or someone." Hopefully PowerComputing can do something about this $50 upgrade fee Global Village want and I will get satisfaction! Frankly I think global village are the ones dropping the ball on this one. It is supposed to V.34 compliant, isn't it?
  • TechTool 1.1.2 thinks it is a UMAX machine of indeterminate model, with a 603p(?!) CPU.
  • The fan is louder than my 7500, but not like the jet engines I hear people complain about in some other PC machines. To give you feel for how quiet it is, if i hum a tone to myself as quietly as possible while still vocalizing (ie not just whispering) the humming is about 1.5 times louder than the fan. (The tower front is 3 ft from my head). It is a bit quieter than a Quadra 840AV we have at work.
  • No NOW utilities with PBase,. This was spelled out in the PB tech spec sheets at the PowerCC site, but I was hoping it was omitted in the spec sheet by accident :-( .
  • The publshing mixes on MacBench seem to be marginally *slower* than my 7500 while itis much faster in all other tests. I wonder if this is a bus speed effect, (40 MHz vs 50Mhz) since I bet the publishing graphics an disk mixes probably use publishing style humungoid files? Is it a SCSI thing?
  • I can't find my Now Contact and Now Up to Date License number.
  • I found no reference to "SRS" or "surround" anywhere on my disk or in the manual. Then, when I was rerunning my graphics benchmarks, I hadto open the "Monitors and Sound" control panel and there was a little SRS check box on the bottom. I turned it on and through the headphones, there was a definite change.
  • The 2 Gig SCSI that delivered these sizzling benchmarks, is an IBM model number DORS-32160. * I found no reference to "SRS" or "surround" anywhere on my disk. When I was rerunning my graphics benchmarks, I had to open the "Monitors and Sound" control panel and there was a little SRS check box on the bottom. I turned it on and through the headphones there was a definite change.
  • In the literature that came with the machine there is a card to be filled out that says only 2D acceleration software was included, but that a free update to 3D acceleration will be sent to me for free when it is ready. Further poking around found a "graphics accelerator" extension v 1.1f1 or something like that, copyright by Apple(!) and ATI. I winder what Apple has to with this? I have the impresion that this is an extension that takes advantage of some hardware in the box. I think I have seen this particular extension icon somewhere before.
    • Thanks David!