iMac G3 revival

[estrides]

Awesome man, this is gonna be freaking sick once you get it all up and running!

 

[Medic278]

While I have never owned a PowerPC I saw this thread and read through it and I have to say its pretty awesome. I can totally understand why you would do this to your childhood machine. Everyone remembers their first computer. The iMac aquarium is awesome I have been thinking about doing this but can't justify killing a working machine just to put fish in there, after all I am sure someone can use it. Anyway just want to say best of luck and power on, I look forward to more updates!

 

[Arkious]

Awesome man, this is gonna be freaking sick once you get it all up and running!

Thanks i hope it is! managed to lend an old PSU and pick the board up tomorrow from the post office... let the pictures start rolling!

While I have never owned a PowerPC I saw this thread and read through it and I have to say its pretty awesome. I can totally understand why you would do this to your childhood machine. Everyone remembers their first computer. The iMac aquarium is awesome I have been thinking about doing this but can't justify killing a working machine just to put fish in there, after all I am sure someone can use it. Anyway just want to say best of luck and power on, I look forward to more updates!

Yeah i know what u mean, thats how i felt... however my original plan was to use the CRT from that iMac in the one i am now modifying. But that is almost an impossibility, so unfortunatly at that point i was either going to rebuild and sell or do what i had planned in the 1st place. plus for £25 i didnt mind at all, as the whole thing has been recycled.

Just as a little update, ive been looking in more detail at this motherboard and it has overclocking capabilities of over 2GHz, so when it arives tomorrow... im going to lap the cooler to 2000 grit and then Arctic Silver 5 them both to increase heat transfer... just incase i try to squeeze the juice from this monster! :-D

 

[estrides]

Iv'e seen that those little boards can OC quite easily. My neighbor has an HTPC with a very similar board and he overclocked his and just used HUGE heatsinks to keep it cool. silent is the name of the game in that respect i guess...

 

[Arkious]

Iv'e seen that those little boards can OC quite easily. My neighbor has an HTPC with a very similar board and he overclocked his and just used HUGE heatsinks to keep it cool. silent is the name of the game in that respect i guess...

im quite limited on the heatsink size so i will see what stock does. but lapping and AS5 will help

 

[estrides]

Definitely. The paste will help a boat load. especially with such a small.

 

[MAC MAN JW]

Can't wait to see pic's of it done, this will be the coolest iMac ever

 

[Arkious]

Definitely. The paste will help a boat load. especially with such a small.

Well the motherboard turned up today, i removed the heatsink and the old stuff was like rock, just the original crap.

Can't wait to see pic's of it done, this will be the coolest iMac ever

Lets hope so :-D keep checking... PICS INCOMING!




Well as stated above, i picked up the motherboard today before i started nightshift. And being as exited as i was, i had to open it up just to have a little peek and here it is...

Now the 1st thing that sprung to mind was hmmmmmmm its a friday night shift so it should be quite quiet, perhaps i should use this time to lap the cooler? so off it came

wow that atom cpu is tiny!!! the bigger chip is the northbridge and it dwarfs the atom lol.

Anyways i grabbed some 160, 1200 & 2500 grit paper and some metal polish for lapping the cooler when i got to work. As i thought it was quite quiet so i plodded on and here is how it went.

3 sand papers

the starting point, i tried to remove the old paste and it was solid! so i thought meh, al sand it off ^.^

15 mins in...

quick top shot of the plexiglass i was using to keep it flat

an hour in... showing how bowed the cooler is as stock!

2 hours later -.- starting to wish i never started tbh, but hey! i was getting paid to do it so why would i stop!

finally flat after 3 1/2 hours of quite hard graft! now to start buffing it back up, at this point i decided it would be better to turn it upside down in a vice as the 1200 grit paper isnt going to remove much material.

4 hours in, 30 mins with this paper and i was happy to start with the 2500 grit paper

4 1/2 hours in, 30 mins again with the 2500 grit paper and i was quite happy to start buffing!

WOWEEEEEEE!!!! i can see my iphone! haha now thats a mirror! its not perfect but bluddy hell its better than it was! if i wanted to remove all the scratches i would need to use the 2500 a bit longer but its not exactly watercooling with a pure copper base so its going to be much better than it was!

Next step is to refit the screws to base and refit the cooler to the motherboard, but i need to locate my AS5 paste as it seems to have taken a wonder :-S

EDIT: I realise that the fan is upside down, the previous owner installed it that way. After i washed and blow dryed the heat sink, i cleaned the fan and fitted it the correct way.

 

[Arkious]

A final polish before fixings reattached... Perfection!

 

[estrides]

Hot damn! That looks magnificent! And yeah, that processor is sooooooo tiny. This is just getting better and better though!

 

[Arkious]

Hot damn! That looks magnificent! And yeah, that processor is sooooooo tiny. This is just getting better and better though!

haha thanks a bunch, yeah when i got home... the missus picked it up, looked at it, said... OMG! then put down lol xD

I dont honestly know how much of a difference on temperatures this will make, a lot on quad cores with water cooling but this might not have as much of an impact. There is a few threads on temperatures and overclocking with this motherboard so i will do the same and compare temperatures.

RAM turned up today, just waiting on the Hard Drive & testing PSU.

I opted in for;

2 x 2GB PNY DDR2 800
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 160GB

 

[tjsdaname]

that polish job is insane!

keep up the good work! I can wait to see it finished

 

[FlatlinerG]

Awesome work! Love seeing older Macs like this one getting love.

 

[Arkious]

that polish job is insane!

keep up the good work! I can wait to see it finished

Haha thanks, will do!

Awesome work! Love seeing older Macs like this one getting love.

Thanks, yeah its good but i sure hope it works!


Being my 1st day off today, im hoping to get the heatsink refitted with AS5 paste attached. now one thing im a bit confused at is the fact the CPU has a thermal pad but the northbridge doesnt. I wonder if the die height of the atom is slightly less? if so this might cause me some issues

 

[estrides]

Hmmm, ive never thought of that before. Hopefully it doesnt make too many setbacks, Id hate to see this project get delayed...

 

[Arkious]

Just another update for today...

I cleaned the dies of the processors with 99.9% Pure Isopropanol Alcohol that i got when i worked for a semiconductor manufacturer a few year back. As you can see, not much left! :O

Here is a pic of the CPU and GPU/ North Bridge chipset

I checked the height of the dies and they look to be the same height, if they are not they are not far off at all.

I then applied the AS5 using a scalpel blade to ensure a very thin amount is used. Probably the best I've ever applied thermal paste lol! Instructions vary regarding thermal pastes, some say a blob and others say spread using a blade. I prefer spreading using a blade as you can guarantee all parts of the die are covered and that you haven't used too much.

Here is my 4GB of RAM

And finally here is the board reassembled with the RAM in place.

Now I'm still waiting on the hard drive and that should turn up tomorrow, if it does i will start the Mac OS X Lion installation. But me being me... I just had to test this thing!!! so i stole the 20 pin ATX power connector from my other half's PC and set it up like this lol.

EPIC! haha

But anyways it worked and i got access to the BIOS, and the bios is very very good, i.e. it lets you do a heck of a lot! so i thought, lets see what temperature it runs at idle, so i left it on the hardware monitor screen for an hour and look what it is... bearing in mind my house at the time is 20'C

Quite impressed obviously the tell tale will be when i stress test it, but for now I'm very happy.

 

[estrides]

Awesome, awesome, awesome. That board is so freaking tiny. Also, It runs exceptionally cool...hopefully if you over-clock it, it can maintain only a slightly higher temp.

 

[ghett0tech]

greaaaat build

 

[MacHappytjg]

interesting this makes me wanna resurrect my old g3

 

[Arkious]

Awesome, awesome, awesome. That board is so freaking tiny. Also, It runs exceptionally cool...hopefully if you over-clock it, it can maintain only a slightly higher temp.

I was going to test overclocking yesterday but I need to know standard load temps 1st and look at the difference. But fingers crossed the hard drive comes today and then al start installing OS X I found a feature that holds the Zotac boot screen until it starts booting windows, I wonder if I can blank that screen so the first thing you see is the OS X boot screen? That will require a bios mod tho

greaaaat build

Thanks

interesting this makes me wanna resurrect my old g3

Do it! :-D these machines are works of art!

 

[Arkious]

unfortunatly... my hard drive didn't turn up :-( but never the less! i have been looking at how to install Lion from the App Store download. This is what i am going to use;

http://tonymacx86.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/unibeast-install-mac-os-x-lion-using.html

so I'm off to buy an 8GB USB stick which at the cost of £8, not too bad and tbh i could use a bigger one ^.^

I don't know if anything will be visible on the the iMac's CRT so i might have to use the LCD on my other half's PC for installation

 

[estrides]

I don't know if anything will be visible on the the iMac's CRT so i might have to use the LCD on my other half's PC for installation

Yeah, eliminate any possible issues that might arise. Getting a hackintosh up and running is not always the easiest, so you don;t want to have to troubleshoot unnecessary anomalies.

 

[Arkious]

been on with this all day using unibeast to create a bootable USB stick. however i have just found out that OS X Lion does not support the Atom CPU. so after many hours searching i found this;

https://sites.google.com/site/nozyc...ow-to-install-lion-10-7-0-on-zotac-ionitx-a-e

i installed that over the top of the Unibeast USB installation and it has allowed me to get going partially. I'm stuck at "Still waiting for root device" which am assuming is the hard drive that isn't there lol

 

[Arkious]

well i have just managed to get this thing to the following screen... FINALLY! after all day messing around.

So if anyone ever goes to follow this thread or do something similar do the following;

1) follow step 1 & 2 of this website, this program makes work a lot easier! it works for a normal installation right through but because i am using the Intel Atom, this is where i hit the problems.

http://tonymacx86.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/unibeast-install-mac-os-x-lion-using.html

2) follow this through by installing it over the top of unibeast. this creates altered versions of the kext files that allow the Atom to be used. Again this saves much trouble!

https://sites.google.com/site/nozyc...ow-to-install-lion-10-7-0-on-zotac-ionitx-a-e

just as a little extra... here is my testing setup, using my other half's hard drive. i was correct in thinking that it requires a hard drive to be detected before allowing boot up.

 

[estrides]

IT LIVES!!!! Are you going to remove the guts of the imac? Or just work around them?