The 9500 includes several technological firsts for Apple. The CPU is connected via a
daughterboard, and so can be swapped easily. Processor cards available were Single-processor versions ranging from 120 to 200 MHz, and a
dual processor card with two 180 MHz CPUs. This is also the first Macintosh to use the
PCI standard, with six PCI slots available—one of which must be used for a
graphics card.). The logic board has a total of 12 memory slots; like the
Power Macintosh 8100, installing memory requires removing the logic board from the case. When it was introduced, 64 MB DIMMs were the largest available on the market, making for a maximum memory limit of 768 MB. Companies like Advantage Memory were selling DIMMs of this size for US$3,900 each. 128 MB DIMMs were introduced later in 1995, offering a theoretical limit of 1.5 GB memory, though
System 7.5.2 is unable to use more than 1 GB of memory. Some other firsts for a Macintosh include a regular
10BASE-T Ethernet port alongside the
AAUI port, as well as support for the new
SCSI-2 Fast standard, and a 4X CD-ROM. was used by various
Macintosh clone makers as a reference design and a modified version was used in the non-Macintosh
Apple Network Server series. The Tsunami board was later reused with minor modifications in earlier variants of the Power Macintosh 9600, although later replaced with an updated "Kansas" variant for 300 and 350 MHz variants. Utilizing a third-party G4 CPU upgrade and the
XPostFacto installation utility it is possible to run up to
Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" on a 9500, making it the oldest model capable of running Mac OS X. == Models ==