Pios ships 300-MHz Power750 box
German computer maker Pios Computer AG released earlier this month what it claims is the world's fastest Mac OS machine. In addition, the company is readying a Mach 5 CPU upgrade card.
Pios' speedy new desktop, the Magna 300, costs $6,299 and is based on the Tsunami logic board design. The machine uses a PowerPC 750 chip clocked at 300 MHz and has a bus speed of 50 MHz. It contains 1 Mbyte of Level 2 backside cache running at 300 MHz, according to the company, and 512 Kbytes of Level 3 cache on the system bus.
The Magna 300 comes with a 4.5-Gbyte Ultra SCSI-3 hard drive and 80 Mbytes of RAM, expandable to 1,048 Mbytes, Pios said. The machine also features an internal Iomega Zip drive, a 24x CD-ROM drive and a floppy disk drive.
Pios' box uses an 8-Mbyte IXmicro accelerator card. In addition, the system comes with Mac OS 8 installed and ClarisWorks Office.
The high-end machine joins PIOS' other PowerPC 750 offerings. The first, the Magna 275, is a 275-MHz, $5,499 machine that comes with a 4.5-Gbyte Ultra SCSI-3 hard drive, 80 Mbytes of RAM, an internal ZIP drive and a 24x CD-ROM mechanism. The second, the Magna 250, costs $3,999. With a 250-MHz processor, the machine features a 4.3-Gbyte hard drive, 48 Mbytes of RAM and a 24x CD-ROM drive. Both systems use an IXmicro card.
PIOS also has two 604e systems. The $2,399 Magna 200 uses a PowerPC 604e chip running at 200 MHz, a 2.1-Gbyte hard drive, 16 Mbytes of RAM and a 24x CD-ROM device. The $1,690 Keenya 604/200 also uses a 604e processor clocked at 200 MHz. It comes with a 3.2-Gbyte hard drive, 32 Mbytes of RAM and a 12x CD-ROM drive. Both machines use cards from ATI Technologies Inc.
For CPU upgrades, PIOS is working on a 300-MHz Mach 5 CPU upgrade card. The 300-MHz board, priced at $999, will ship by the end of the year. It will work in Power Mac 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500 and 9600 machines and selected boxes from UMAX Computer Corp. and Power Computing Corp., the company said.
PIOS Computer AG of Hildesheim, Germany, can be reached at 49-51-217-5330; fax 49-51-217-5337-5; info@pios.de; http://www.pios.de.