Apple had always tried to cater for multiple markets ranging from the simple desktop machines through to the high-end servers, and the new 9500 series certainly knew where it fell. Armed with the Motorola 604 running at a blistering 120MHz or 132MHz, the 9500 was a beast of machine. The speed alone was impressive (performing 87% faster than the equivalently clocked Intel Pentium when performing integer operations and 72% faster for floating point according to a Byte report of the time) but the machine was more than just a speed box. Boasting 12 RAM expansion slots and six PCI slots, the 9500 could accept up to 1.5Gb of RAM and just about every expansion card that a user could ever want to add (even if one of them had to be used for the video card - the machine didn't have onboard video which was further evidence of its server status).

Using the new Tsunami architecture, the 9500 was the first Power PC tower that utilised the 'daughter-card' approach to processors and users could quickly upgrade their machine by simply removing the processor card and plugging in a faster version (a system that allowed Apple to cut costs and appeal to a wider range of budgets).

Time waits for no man (or machine) and the 9500 quickly adapted to the ever changing face of technology with a 150MHz version becoming available less than a year after the release of the first two machines and 180MHz and 200Mhz versions appearing a further four months later. These two final machines were not only a speed boost though as both used the Motorola 604e rather than the older 604 (itself a vast improvement on the first generation 603). The 200MHz machine was fast but it was the 180MHz machine that was arguably more interesting as it took advantage of the Tsunami architectures ability to support multiple processors - the 180MHz machine was actually dual-processor.

An ideal server machine, the 9500 also saw the light of day as the 9515, the 132MHz version of the 9500 which was only available to the European and Asian markets.

When the museum first took possession of a Quadra 950, the only word that really described it was 'big'. The same can also be said of the PowerMac 9500. Although looking like nothing more than yet another recycling of the venerable Quadra 800 case, the 9500 is actually the old case on steroids. It's huge, it's the same width and depth but it's grown upwards and, given what's inside, that's totally understandable.

My machine came via eBay (as per usual) and cost the princely sum of £0.99 - a bargain in anybody's book but better was yet to come. Twin graphics cards were nice (not sure if it supports multiple monitors or not though) and 128Mb of RAM was certainly 'healthy' but it was the fact that this was the 200MHz version that really made this stand out from the crowd. It's a beast of a machine and this was only re-enforced when I had a hunt around the hard disk and found PhotoShop, Poser and a whole host of 3D animation and modelling packages - this (not so) little machine had certainly done more than its far share of demanding work.

Given the case being based on the Quadra 800, the 9500 also suffers from the same problems inasmuch as it's a 'steelie' (rather than a plastic case) but this is hardly the end of the world. It's fast, powerful, has oodles of expansion possibilities and, at the price I paid, a genuine bargain.