Apple's switch to the PowerPC CPU was supposed to have introduced a whole new level of power and performance into the Apple Mac world but problems with the 6200 series had seriously tarnished what should have been a golden age for the company. The switch to the Motorola 603e had gone some way to fix the damage and an improved motherboard finally allowed the 'PowerMacs' to show what they could really do. Come October 1996 though and it was time for the PowerMac series to go in a new direction: up.

Tower based Macs had been available before but the newly released 6400 used a totally new ever-so-slightly curved design that not only looked great but also housed one of the most powerful Macs seen up to that point. Retaining the 603e CPU, the 6400 pushed the chip to either 180MHz and 200Mhz - a massive figure for 1996 (Note: The 180MHz version was sold to the North American market as the 6400, elsewhere it was named the 6410). Shipping with 16Mb of RAm, the machine's twin DIMM slots allowed up to 136Mb of main memory. This was all good news for buyers but nothing particularly inniovative or original - the built-in subwoofer though was.

While the 6400 might have sounded good on paper and actually been a solid machine, it was actually little more than a refinement of the existing PowerMac 5400 (which had been released six months earlier running at a more modest 120Mhz. The 180MHz version would be released just three weeks before the PowerMac 6400 (two months after the Performa 6400) and the 200Mhz version not shipping until the following February). In fact many commentators simply branded it as a 5400 without the built in monitor.

A solid and reliable machine, the 6400 may have looked a little different from an aesthetic point of view but, under the hood, it was very much business as usual. It also marked the end of the line for the Performa series (the machine was available to consumers as the 'Performa 64XX' and to the education market as the 'PowerMac 64XX') - after this everything would simply be 'PowerMac'.

PowerMacs may not be the museum's primary concern but the lack of 68K based Macs still out there often means that just about anything with an Apple logo on it is welcomed with open arms. Then again, some things are priced so stupidly that you just can't resist - such was the case with the PowerMac 6400.

For a mere £5 I landed a 200MHz machine with 72Mb of RAM. Now given that I like the shape (and the sound) of the 6500, the 6400 was a bargain already but when it finally arrived, that bargain practically became daylight robbery. From the outside things didn't look good as there was a very ominous rattle going on inside and popping the hood showed that the previous owner had installed a second hard drive (a 500Mb SCSI - very useful in these days of 50-pin SCSI drives seemingly having disappeared) but hadn't bothered to bolt it down. Yes this drive had been banging about inside the machine for the best part of a week while it traversed the anals of the UK's postal service. Never mind, it still works.

The hard drive had been a bonus but the real 'magic' came in the shape of a purple heatsink. Although a 200MHz 6400 is a fast machine, it's practically pedestrian compared to 6400 with a 400Mhz Crescendo G3 card plugged in. So, for just £5, we'd landed a 400MHz G3 machine which has the kick ass subwoofer, 72Mb of RAM, twin hard drives and a USB card fitted.

To gauge the 6400's speed is, obviously, not easy given the upgrades that it's had but it's still a fantastic machine. It looks great, it sounds great, the motherboard is easily accessible (the drives less so as, just like the 6500, the case is a 'Chinese Sliding Puzzle' design) and it has several easy upgrades that can be fitted to boost performance. All in all, a great machine to use.