G5 Hackintosh build diary.

So as some may or may not know my 2.3 DP G5 power supply fried itself to death, Upon looking at prices of power supplies/ Being annoyed at how this once epic machine is now un supported by most useful applications (i.e Flash runs like crap even with a 6800 Ultra) I decided it was time to make a Hackintosh!

Now the first revision of Hardware is not what final build will use, The Motherboard, Cpu and hd's and Graphics card will be updated to something I can only assume will be a Micro ATX form factor and a nice intel i5 quad.

Also as I want to re use the original power supply casing in order to not make the inside too untidy I had a slight engineering issue of fitting the taller heat sinks into the not very high G5 power supply case.

So in my build I have gone for an older 250 watt psu which I had lying around, If I find it is too under powered for my final build I will try to upgrade it.

So I gutted out the PSU and slapped the donor components into the psu cage to see if it would fit, Thankfully this being the second PSU I tried the heat sinks were just small enough to go in...Great success!



After that I marked out the holes with a pen and made a pilot. Then I drilled through so I could mount the main board with screws and nuts.



Then I needed to wire the fans up, I'm not 100% sold on the cooling efficiency of these as they don't seem to turn very fast, Tempted to add some small exhaust fans next to the other end of the PSU to help drag air through.



Next it was bye bye old SATA and molex connectors as I wanted to wire in the stock set up for the G5 as I will be using the hard drive and optical drive bays in the same set up as they came from Apple.



And here we have the connector soldered up, Honestly if you're not going to use a soldering Iron then don't even bother trying this because it will end up in tears.



And here we have the other cables soldered in using heat shrink tubing for insulation, The masking tape is to stop the cables fouling on the metal edges, I currently don't have any electrical tape so when I add extra fans I will change that out for the black stuff.



Also I used special heavy duty double sided grip tape to keep the transformer stuck down as well as the voltage selector switch, I am very confident this won't go anywhere and it sticks on like an absolute treat!

Plugged in and test on the donor parts for the engineering stage of the build and...



Hoorah it works and powers up, Now the PSU has a temp sensor on the heat sinks so I will have to see if it shuts itself down/ how warm things get.

More updates when the MOBO tray arrives

Will.

So the next day started off rather a bit like this...Please excuse my father in the background I really had no idea he was there until after I took the photo



Now for this build I've decided to go the MOBO tray route, This is a Lian Li Micro ATX case I found lying around on the internet, £28 delivered later and this is what we have.



So I then took the measurements for the holes as I would need to leave enough to fit the internals in but also leave enough case left for the tray to rivet down onto.





Then after a bit of cutting this is what it looked like, Now unfortunately my Jigsaw died half way through the cutting which meant I had to finish it by hand with the improper tools...Which made things a few holes out of line.



The bad part about this is it means my perfect measuring went out the bloody window as I had ended up cutting about 2-3 holes too many away each side which resulted in there being a little bit of a gap and a minor angle adjustment to make it fit...Oh well it is at the back where no one looks :/



Bugger ups with rubbish cutting tools aside I then worked on fitting the mobo tray down on the inside so it wouldn't flap about, Screws and araldite and a couple hours drying made sure that unless I am grabbing the motherboard tray like an utter looney it's not going anywhere, Here it is with a test fitted board.



With the sata power cables run and the IDE for the optical drive router it was time to jump the power connector on the mobo with a screwdriver to see if it lives... And it does!





All for now.

Switchback666 said:

Awesome thread mate

Click to expand...

Cheers, Got a day or two of work left on it before she is ready for the fast parts

Sorry!

Sorry about the delay...Work, lots of gigging and Christmas has got in the way of this poor geeky musician

After the trial fit of the motherboard the next thing I needed to do was sort out power switches, The power switch on the case itself is actually a little damaged and by the end of the machines life I was powering it on with great difficulty so it needed to come out.





Not 100% happy with the switches I have at the moment so I will source some flush fitting aluminum effect switches and a white LED as the red is staring into my soul with out of placeness (if that's even a word).

Some of you may have clocked the second switch and assumed it was for a reset...Oh no it's not!

I wanted to add a switch that would allow me to eject the drive before I got into the OS and obviously as the old Mac left mouse button trick at start up wouldn't work I figured wiring in a physical switch would be best.





About a week after I took these photos I had a box of stuff arrive in the mail



Got me a Core i3 3220, 4 GB Corsair vengeance ram and a P8 H61-MX to get the ball rolling. This set up is kind of a half way point of hardware but more on that later.

So let's build it!







I decided to use the stock CPU cooler for the moment as I have no intention of overclocking this thing in its current rendition but it stays fairly cool and quiet so I am happy.

I decided it was time to load an OS on but disaster struck! No matter what I tried I couldn't get OS X to boot past the Apple logo even though this board was said to of worked.



So for now it's a Windows 7 machine until I can afford the money to get a fully compatible board and an i7 to go with it.



Pulls up some decent specs using on board GPU and a random 500GB Hard drive.

So the final section for the moment as there will be some radio silence for a little while due to my MacBook Pro deciding it didn't like having a working 8600GT will be my future plan list in this order.

Change the switches and LED out, Build USB and Fire Wire headers for front panel, Sort out fans and cooling.

Get the caddy to use old MacBook Wireless card in PC.

Buy a OS X compatible graphics card and a high power PSU

New compatible motherboard, Processor + more memory.

SSD + 1TB data drive and a Drobo or something better for backups.

For those wondering I plan to use the current guts when replaced for a HTPC so I can watch films and do light gaming on my TV.

All for now, Will.

Arkious said:

good progress :-D i agree with the red LED, why dont you get an aluminium power switch with an LED in it, then use the LED above (different colour maybe) as an activity indicator?

Click to expand...

Oooh that could be a plan, Been searching for some switches with LEDs and I think I may have come up with something...So watch this space

Also spent a good couple hours browsing and I've settled on these parts.

A MSI Z77MA-G45 Motherboard and eventually a i7 3770K.

A Corsair CX500 PSU.

An ATI 6670 1GB Sapphire, Had one of these in my C2Q Snow Leopard build a while back and it worked superbly! I know it is also a bit of an older card but It will do as it certainly won't be a gaming machine and it's better than the 2600XT in my Mac Pro

So yeah it's just saving money now!