Will It Work?

[slickrick]

I've just bought a cheap 5500/250 (Blaq) to run PT Toolbox with Vision DSP for home use. The idea is that I can build "mud-maps" at home and bring them in to work to expand on the fully blown PTools system at work.

Has anyone out there done it with these machines? I've told the boss (wife) that it'd give me more time at home, instead of with that hussy 9600.

Any feedback would be great.

Cheers

Rick

[Avid]

We never tested it, but I'm fairly certain that it would work rather well for what you want to do with Vision or Pro Tools PowerMix.
But there's a catch:
According to the specs at http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl..._5500_250.html "The Apple Power Macintosh 5500/250, is based on the Gazelle architecture, features a 250 MHz PowerPC 603e processor."
This is almost identical to the motherboard specs for the 6500/250, which was the successor to the 6400, which is qualified with Toolbox.
It's got a 256k Level 2 Ram cache, room for 128 MB of RAM, and just about everything you need except for one:
NO PCI SLOT!
This all in one unit was made for schools, and instead of the 2 PCI slots that the 6500 has, tje 5500 has the following expansion slots: LC, TV, Vid, Comm.

so you can't use an AMIII card in it. I used to have a Quadra 605, which also had an LC slot, and I had an Audiomedia LC card for it. Long discontinued, and quite hard to find on the used market.

Unless you have a 5500/250 that was configured differently than the ones listed, Apple took a perfectly good machine, and made it really hard to upgrade with anything besides a TV card. A shame, too, because I'm sure it's fast enough for just about anything you want to throw at it. Should be a slammin native only machine, though.

Bruce Paine
Tech Marketing

[slickrick]

Thanks All..

Yeah, I figured I might have some problems. Pity as, yes, it cooks as a cpu.

Anyone for a cheap 5500??!!

Cheers,

Rick

[slickrick]

Thanks All..

Yeah, I figured I might have some problems. Pity as, yes, it cooks as a cpu.

Anyone for a cheap 5500??!!

Cheers,

Rick