Building a MacPro, Yes, a MacPro not a Hackintosh Options

[aqua-mac]

Nagal,

Looking good, do you have an overall pic of the area of the riser cards to heat sinks? Are the risers secure enough without support at the heat sink side?

[skyhighmac]

Wow, they look much bigger in these photos.

[nagal]

skyhigh - the heat sinks on the memory are pretty massive!

aqua-mac - I think the riser card will be fine without the support on the CPU heat sink side. I was messing around with the plastic piece for that side of the memory cage and it looks like I could mod it to fit over my heat sinks but there is no way the metal part of the memory cage will go in.

I will take some pics of that area along with the Power Supply that was sitting on my front door when I just got home Need to eat first.

[nagal]

I have to say the Power Supply was a TOTAL pain in the ass to put in. It is so simple looking, I was dumbfounded by how hard it was to get in. I have big hands, so working in tight spaces as always been an issue for me and once again they were causing me problems. I struggled for 30 minutes trying to get all four plugs in but could never get #3 to plug in. After a lot of cursing I decided to take the ribbon wraps off the the cabling. 5 minutes later, PSU was in. Sheeze! There are 5 screws used to hold the PSU in. The screws are M3 but I did not have anything long enough to fasten them down. Luckily, once you slide the lock assembly to lock, the PSU gets locked in. I will get those screws but for now I can live with out them. ApplePalace has them for $26 for 5. McMaster Carr has comparable M3 20mm stainless steel socket head screws $7.56 for 100. I wonder where I am going to order them?

So here are some pics of the PSU







besides the side panel piece and the custom plugs, that sure looks about the same size as an ATX PSU to me.

And here is a pic of everything in!



I did put my Asus 7300GT in just to see and yes, it would not boot. Everything would power up, fans would spin, I would get the start sound from the speaker but it would not do anything else. I did try to eject the cd by holding down the mouse button during boot but for some reason the tray would not pop out. It could be an alignment issue as it was trying.

There is an Apple Store about 2 hour drive from me. I am going to call them tomorrow and if they have a 7300GT in stock it will be road trip time. Its sad to pay $149 for a 7300GT but finding one on eBay has been a challenge and I am so close to being finished I will pay it the extra for the instant gratification I wish there was a way to flash my Asus and have it work but I have not seen anything online about it.

On a side note, this thing is LOUD! It might be simply because the fans go 100% until a certain part of the boot cycle or the thermal probes I am using are not working and it thinks it is running super hot. So the future might hold some quiet fans or water cooling. As long as the system will boot without a drive in Slot 1, I will re-visit the water cooling aspect.

[skyhighmac]

nagal, check this out first >> http://themacelite.wikidot.com/nvidia-section

[nagal]

nagal, check this out first >> http://themacelite.wikidot.com/nvidia-section

Oh sweet! Thank you so much! I have been searching and searching and never found what I was looking for. I guess I was using the wrong search words. Luckily I have my work laptop here so if the flashing goes bad I will have a computer

It looks like I can do this but not 100% sure. Never flashed a card so a bit leary right now. Maybe after another Guinness I will work up the courage

[~pcwiz]

nagal, I'm pretty sure that this is obvious, but after flashing if the 7300GT doesn't work, try getting a Mac specific 7300GT video card. This 7300GT Mac card is specifically for a Mac Pro:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/4582...ce_7300_GT.html

[nagal]

nagal, I'm pretty sure that this is obvious, but after flashing if the 7300GT doesn't work, try getting a Mac specific 7300GT video card. This 7300GT Mac card is specifically for a Mac Pro:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/4582...ce_7300_GT.html

That is what I was originally planning on getting if my "local" Apple Store had them in stock. I am looking at the ROM flashing right now it the list only shows 7600GT from iMac, I need a 7300GT so the search is on. Thanks for the link.

[~pcwiz]

Your welcome! The link I posted above, the price of the card is $148.95. I checked out the same card at the Apple Store:

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebO...More=MA567Z%2FA

Its 5 cents more expensive If you are doing an online order, order from the Apple Store definitely. For 5 cents more, the Apple Store name is a pretty good deal

[nagal]

Does not look like flashing is an option for me. While the 7300GT uses the same GPU as the 7600GT, my card only has a 64K EPROM and there is no modified ROM for the 7300. Lets hope the Apple Store has a card in stock so I can go pick it up tomorrow

OR

I can see if I can find a known card that is flashable locally and give that a try tomorrow as well.

[Fatherless One]

Fantastic build up Nagal, well done.

[aqua-mac]

All mac pro cards need a 128kb rom chip as there are two parts to the rom software. The first part is the rom itself and the second part is the EFI part that injects values at boot time. Some pc cards (a few) already have 128 rom chips fitted, you may be lucky. You can have a look with nvflash. The only card I have managed to convert for a mac pro so far is a 7800 GTX 512 and 256 version into a Quadro FX 4500. These did need new rom chips resoldering though. The roms are available for downloading here. Strange thing is, I could never get a real PC Quadro FX 4500 to boot!!@? Good luck, I am looking forward to the first boot!!

[Harloe]

Hey Nagal,

Great build, truly inspiring! I am planning a Hackintosh housed in a G5 case in the coming 2 months, I am going to mod the case first before buying any parts. Do you have any advice for a non-experienced modder? This would be my first proper project to work on and I am determined to do this! I'm just a little skeptical about the whole cutting a hole in the rear-end of the case so the motherboard will go there without having to wire things in and out of the case, etc.

Also has this mod cost you less, the same, or more as a normal Mac Pro that you'd buy directly from Apple?

Thanks and keep up the great work! =D

[nagal]

I am looking forward to the first boot!!

You aren't the only one Kind of torturous that it is 7am here and the Apple Store does not open till 10 am.

Hey Nagal,Great build, truly inspiring! I am planning a Hackintosh housed in a G5 case in the coming 2 months, I am going to mod the case first before buying any parts. Do you have any advice for a non-experienced modder? This would be my first proper project to work on and I am determined to do this! I'm just a little skeptical about the whole cutting a hole in the rear-end of the case so the motherboard will go there without having to wire things in and out of the case, etc.Also has this mod cost you less, the same, or more as a normal Mac Pro that you'd buy directly from Apple?Thanks and keep up the great work! =D

Thanks I haven't done the finally cost savings yet because I still have a couple things to buy and to be honest there is a couple ways I can do it. If I compare it to directly buying a similar speced system from Apple (can not get a 1 to 1 match due to hard drive sizes) the savings is around $4000. If I compare it to buying the base 8 core system and then using 3rd party memory and re-using my existing hard drives the savings drops do to around $2000. No matter how you look at it, I win :DAs for modding a G5, go for it! There is a ton of info here on how to do it. Just do not rush it. Research, research, research. While there is not step by step guide to modding a G5 case you should be able to get a detail plan of attack by following the various threads here.

[Kane Adams]

Don't think it will open today.

[nagal]

Don't think it will open today.

Luckily the Holiday Schedule was posted on Apple.com. I just got back and with the video card Checking email and what not before trying to boot this sucka

[skyhighmac]

Cool!

[nagal]

Three and half hours later and $170ish dollars lighter I am the proud owner of a MAC 7300GT





I wasted no time putting the card in and booting it up. It all worked like magic! Boot from DVD was so fast compared to doing ToH RC2 on my Hack it is not even funny. Enjoy the screenies









My Quality Control Inspector hard at work



If you have not guessed, I am posting this from my MacPro. And here is some proof



I do not know why Activity Monitor does not show all 8 cores in the main window but you can see them in the CPU Usage window. Weird bug there where the CPU Usage window gets doubled when taking a screen shots. Software Profiler is reporting the CPUs as 2.13 GHz which is not good. It should be 2.4 GHz. I need to contact the person I bought them from and see whats up with that. Still, it shows all 8 cores

Impressions so far.

The clarity of the screens is amazing compared to my Hack with the Asus 7300GT. It is literally a night and day comparison with the font smoothing.

Boot time, silly fast. One annoyance I had with my Hack was that if I had my firewire audio interface plugged in during boot, it would take about an extra 45 seconds to boot up. I am hoping that has gone away but not sure as it is not currently plugged in.

File copying is what it should be. My iTunes library (22 GB) copied in under 10 minutes. On my Hack it was around 18 - 20 minutes.

Things just seem smoother but that really could be my imagination.

Down side.

NOISY! I have some 120MM low noise fans but need to make sure they can just plug in before trying them out. Water cooling is now a must at this point. If the system will boot with out the main drive in Slot 1 that will make life very very easy for me I have an idea to save Slot 1 and water cool but means ditching my dual 120 rad.

iStat is not showing any temp sensor so I have no idea whats going on in that area. Maybe it is just a Leopard thing as it did not work on my Hack either.

[skyhighmac]

Awesome. Water cooling sounds cool! No heatsinks so that means memory cover and cpu cooler with holes! Walk into the apple store with that.

[aqua-mac]

Really glad this has reached a satisfactory conclusion and there were no boot problems. Are the fans running full pelt as mac pros are usually quiet. If your temp sensors are not functioning properly then your fans will run too fast.