Hi guys this has been a long time coming - but my new G5 hackie "Supercomputer" is nearly done!

















For more - Go aquamac.com - New G5 Hackie

Just..WOOOOOOOOOOOOW!! haha
congratulations, aquamac!

very nicely done, would love to see some sort of step by step of how you put everything in the case, mods you had to do, how everything fit, etc...

Unbelievable, really. Wow.


-Stell

looks damn nice

Thanks for the support guys. I will be removing the stainless side panel and putting some shots up of the power supply soon!

This thing is sexy.

waaaaant.

care to post a pricelist?

all i can say is its EXPENSIVE love your mod- as always nice and clean, wish i have the money to do this..

too bad i7 suxxorz

-D-

Why do you think so? Not trying to be funny, I really want to hear your opinion, I have a Q9550 (Yorkfield).

compared to whats coming out (i5 and i9) its crap, as for some of the c2d/c2q they kick i7 around like a little kid.

-D-

Thanks. I have also noticed that they have hardly been adopted by anybody, there must be a reason.
In my case the reason was a whopping difference of 260 Euro for a Nehalem mobo, CPU and RAM, compared to what I got.

It is really beautiful!!
How about the noise? Doesn't it get really hot with the 3cards?
I'm buying it of you

wow Look's fine
for what has you 3 Grafik's is this vor Games or in Comming snowleopard OpenCl power?
and this Grafik has you in DSDT.aml or is this a string ?
sorry for my bad english
Macwolf

le jeune bidouilleur,

It is not too noisy, I have all the fans set to "Silent" in the bios. The bottom card does get quite hot, but then again it got hot with only one card installed.

Macwolf,

The cards are installed with GFX strings. At the moment I can run 6 flat panel displays to use on exhibition stands, or SLi in windows 7 with 2 displays. I hope one day that Apple will enable some form of SLi for open CL, but we will have to wait & see.

Aqua,

where are you getting your coolermaster mobo trays from, I've looked and looked on the net but can't track down a dealer with any in stock. Im in the UK but would gladly get one shipped from just about anywhere.

Any pointers?

It's a shame you don't have any step-by-step build pictures to share, I'd love to rob a bank and replicate this thing!

God, this is f****ng great!
I'd love to see some pictures with sidepanel removed. Am I correct assuming that the PSU is located underneath everything, so just like in the original G5?
Anyway, it's so sexy. Three Graphics cards. Wooow. I really am stunned.

One question remains: Did you cut the rear covering yourself or did you take one from an ATX case? I'm wondering, because I plan to build a G5 Hackintosh myself, so... It'd be kind of you, to share your professional experiences. Or is it all a motherboard tray? (of which somebody spoke of?)

The rear tray is from a Coolermaster "wavemaster"case that I had. I have been looking around but they seem to have stopped making them, at least I cannot find them.

More pics should follow towards the end of the week as I am away on hols at the moment.

I emailed Coolermaster in Holland and they have found me the last Wavemaster mobo tray in the warehouse.
It is on its way to me now for around €30 delivered - I can live with that

Great customer service for a part thats been discontinued for about 4 years!

Hey glad to hear that akira, I was just about to suggest you contacted them, as a few people I know contacted them in the past and they were helpful then too. I left the posts in the G5 case apart from the longest one and drilled the coolermaster tray to fix it in position - works a treat and is very strong!

thanks for the advice aquamac,

I think I've got just about all my parts sorted. Work will be the killer now and don't see me having any time for a month or so but really looking forward to the build. This is my second powerhack mod and gonna take my time with this one.

Always great to see top workmanship like your own builds. It keeps the rest of us trying a little bit harder I think.

Nice. Although if you wanted to get way better temperatures almost a third less than what you have now, you can lap all of contacts inside the cooler. There's like 3 or 4 contacts inside the cooler. But very nice job with the cooling and everything. Looks like it's a real machine that was built by professional companies.

Hi vbetts,

Were you referring to lapping the contacts on the GFX cards coolers or the Coolermaster V10?

The coolermaster. It voids your warranty when you take it apart, but as long as you put it back together right, the difference in temps is worth it.

To get the motherboard tray I just should call or email coolermaster and ask for a wavemaster tray and they should ship it?

Very impressive aquamac; from all points of view. Congratulations.
Diabolik is jealous, haha.
However: can you really get use of a tripple SLI GTX280 ?

Thanks for the kind words pirloui,

Well I can use them in windows SLi, but also driving 6 flat panel screens on our exhibition stands to make a huge wall.

Nisto91,

Give them a try, they can only say no.

Your setup is really amazing!! I myself am untalented and am going to be getting an ATCS 840 case, though I sure wish I could mod. I will have an unused G5 waiting to be sold, after purchasing my new one... If only I had modding skill!

I was wondering if you could answer some questions about your SLI setup.

- Was there any additional work aside from following your Dual Cards GFX strings thread at your site?
-- For instance, did you install the EVGA GTX 285 drivers w/ the Mac Pro check removed?
-- Otherwise, which kext do you actually use for graphics? (Or is GFX strings literally the only thing you need to do?)

- Do you think/know the cheaper P6T models will also support SLI? I only need 2xSLI, and the P6TD is the highest model I'm willing to get. Also I saw toward the end of your GFX string thread that someone says they couldn't get SLI cards working on an EVGA x58, so either they were unlucky, incompetent, or the board really won't support it, so I guess the ASUS P6T line is my only option, since I know you at least have it working.

- Did you have to set PEG options in BIOS to get it working?

- Can you leave the SLI bridges in permanently, or do they need to be swapped in/out to switch between Windows/OS X?

- I see you have support for a full six monitors, but can you achieve an "odd" configuration of monitors, say one monitor in each card? Or the first card filled with two, and the second card containing one?
-- And regarding that, I'm curious, can you make better use of two cards by splitting the monitors between them, and OS X will know to use the VRAM of each for the display of each screen? (I'm not sure if they've even programmed it that way..)

- Does Photoshop (et al) recognize the OpenGL devices and enable full OpenGL acceleration? Definitely can't use CS4 without the OpenGL support. I can see from your website that all the OpenGL stuff seems good, but I'd still like confirmation...

- Any experience with calibration/LUT with those cards? I'll be getting two new HP LP2475w monitors and the best calibrator I can find (like a LaCie Blue Eye Pro) and it would really be sad if I can't calibrate the darn things...

- OpenCL support with those cards in Snow Leopard?

.............

Also for anyone else doing GFX strings (I already made up part of my plist for when I run gfxutil, without having any of the parts yet, haha!), I thought it may be helpful to point out that if your RAM size isn't in the list of hex values on any of the tutorials, just change the number to hex and then take a "0" off the end. For instance 1792MB (my planned GTX 275s) equates to 0x700 in hex, so the "VRAM,totalsize" would be "00000070". It took me a moment to realize it was missing the 0 from the end, and was therefore 16x smaller. (70 = 0x112, 112 x 16 = 1792)... That is probably common knowledge and I am just slow, but I couldn't find anyone talking about sizes larger than 1024MB so I figured I'd still share.

I assume other than the odd RAM size, that since the 275 and 285 are identical (285 just has the clock speeds upped, haha) that I should have no problem getting GTX 275s running, so I guess I will knock on wood. Of course if there are any doubts, or if I end up having problems I could always take them back and get GTX 285 2GB cards instead...

Thanks for any questions you may be able/willing to answer!! It would be a huge relief knowing a lot of that information before I spend away a ton of money... *sigh*

Hi err403.love,

Wow, thats a lot of questions!

From the top,

GFX strings are all I have used in my setup. I am using Snow Leopard so no drivers were needed, but I did try Leo and the 285 drivers work with the Mac Pro check removed.

As far as I know, all X58 boards support SLi and crossfire as that is a feature of the chipset.

I just had a look at the P6TD and I think it will probably be fine.

I did not have to set peg options in the bios as there are no options to set. It boots off the first card. Maybe different on the P6TD though.

The SLi bridge is left in permanently as OSX cannot see it and ignores it.

I can use any DVI output, so I can connect 1 monitor to each card if I want, but you must have a monitor attached to the first card otherwise you cannot see the bios boot up screen. This motherboard checks at boot to see if there is a card in PEG 1 and if there is, it assigns it as the main card. This again may be different on a board with 2 x PCIe slots. In theory, attaching 1 monitor to each card allows each card to use the full memory of that card so should theoretically improve performance. You can see this if you attach 1 monitor then 2 in openGL extensions viewer.

I have just purchased CS4 but it has not arrived yet, however, I did try the downloadable demo and it was blisteringly fast!. So yes it works, I am really looking forward to giving it a go again as my 30 days has run out!

I have not tried calibrating the monitors I am afraid, so I cant help there.

I think you would be fine with the GTX 275 as it has a device id of 05E6 and GTX 280 has a device id of 05E1, so Apple's drivers should support it just fine.

Just a few other considerations on my P6T7 board.

I am using IDE (compatible) mode with Netkas's IOATAFamily.kext as although ICH10 works in Snow, for some reason only the first disk works at full speed in AHCI. There does not seem to be a speed hit though in compatible mode which is good. This only enables the first 4 Sata ports though with 5 & 6 not working. This will probably be the same on the P6TD.

I have edited the Apple AHCI kept to get the two Marvell external ports going.

Both lan sockets work out of the box on this board.

Other than that, there is nothing else to report, all fans controlled by the bios on the "Silent" option and the bios lets you actually multiply an extra x1 above what the CPU is rated at on i7 920 and 950.

Good luck with your system.

Yeah, I'm sorry about that. It started out as "a few" and grew very quickly. I was just so excited to see photos of an SLI Hackintosh setup with all the System Profiler shots, and which exact board you were using, etc... and also the physical shots of your SLI setup *WITH the SLI bridge*!! Basically up until then I had no idea if the bridge could be left in place for certain, and I was really starting to doubt if I should strive for full HW support or just virtualize Snow Leopard Server inside of Win7 and forget about a dual-boot setup. So thanks so much for addressing my questions!!

Regarding the second snippet, I was more worrying that any electronic differences between your board and the other P6Ts may cause SLI to not work among all the models, not X58 SLI support in general. As in your board has 4 x PCI-e x16, whereas the ones I am looking at only have 2 or 3, and your set up could possibly more closely mimick the Mac Pro motherboard for instance, yadda yadda. But I know many people get dual cards working on many motherboards, I was maybe hoping you'd worked with SLI setups on the cheaper P6Ts.

Good luck with your system too! I will look into the P6T7 again, though if any of the other P6T use the same exact ethernet controllers, the only real bonus of upgrading would be the extra multiplier I guess. The AHCI issue is unfortunate, I assumed I'd be using AHCI mode for its benefits for running SSDs, especially the new Intels. I'll have to look out for similar problems and their solutions, and maybe you could keep us all posted here if you ever find the cause?

Thanks again!

Nice work there Aqua-mac

I just tried to visit the aquamac forums but I could not load the foum homepage. Whats happening M8?

Hi Shanky,

It's working here, let me know if you still cannot access it. Proboards did have trouble with their servers last week.

Beautiful! I love it... I have a quik question, somewhat off topic, on your previous build with the Mac Pro case and the P5E3 i noticed you have the HDD mounts, do those really work or is it just for looks?

Hi VBP2004EP3,

If you mean this mod then all the Hard drive bays are now fully populated and working, there is just space with that Asus board to get the Hard drives in if you cut a slot in the bottom as I did.

wow aqua mac thats crazy, it does look like you need to update your signature though! haha

Thanks HackOSXuser,

Consider it done!

I know it's been asked before, but any chance you put some docs together on how to get all this in a Mac Pro case? I am very interested in doing a similar setup, but with some different components. Would like to know how you got all the parts to fix correctly. Thank you and a great job on the systems. Very stunning.

Incredible. It's a great mod. Nice; polished with a powerful platform.
Very well done technically. Congratulations. I love it