Power Mac G4 Quicksilver

Power Mac G4

The "Graphite" Power Mac G4
Developer	Apple Inc.
Type	Desktop
Release date	August 31, 1999
Discontinued	June 20, 2004
CPU	single or dual PowerPC G4, 350 MHz – 1.42 GHz (Up to 2 GHz processors through 3rd-party.)
Predecessor	Power Mac G3 (Blue & White)
Successor	Power Mac G5
Website	apple.com

The Power Mac G4 (originally Power Macintosh G4) is a series of personal computers that were designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple between 1999 and 2004. They used the PowerPC G4 (PPC74xx) series of microprocessors. They were heralded by Apple to be the first personal supercomputers, reaching speeds of 4 to 20 gigaFLOPS. They were the last Macintosh computers able to boot natively to classic Mac OS.

The original Apple Power Mac G4, code name "Yikes!", was introduced at the Seybold conference in San Francisco on August 31, 1999, with 400 MHz, 450 MHz and 500 MHz configurations available. In October 1999, Apple was forced to postpone the 500 MHz because of poor yield of the 500 MHz chips. In response, Apple reduced the clock speed of the processor in each configuration by 50 MHz (making the options 350 MHz, 400 MHz and 450 MHz), which caused some controversy because they did not lower the original prices.

The early 400 MHz (later 350 MHz) PCI-based version used a motherboard identical to the one used in Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White) computers including the use of Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) processors sockets (minus the ADB port), in a "graphite" colored case and with the new Motorola PowerPC 7400 (G4) CPU. The higher-speed models, code name "Sawtooth", used a greatly modified motherboard design with AGP 2x graphics (replacing the 66 MHz PCI slot). In December 1999, the entire Power Mac G4 line was updated to the AGP motherboard.

The machines featured DVD-ROM drives as standard. The 400 MHz and 450 MHz versions had 100 MB Zip drives as standard equipment, and as an option on the 350 MHz Sawtooth. This series had a 100 MHz system bus and four PC100 SDRAM slots for up to 2 GB of RAM (1.5 GB under Mac OS 9). The AGP Power Macs were the first to include an AirPort slot and DVI video port. The computers could house a total of three hard drives, two 128 GB ATA hard drives and up to a single 20GB SCSI hard drive, with the installation of a SCSI card.