Pretty much done.


I finished the power jumper last night. It runs back inside the case and to the back-panel.


The female power socket is held in place with ABS cement.


After a little cable management.... but eh... it will never be pretty on the inside...

but the outside....


Everything is wired and working 100%.

Up next, eSATA (from the PCI-X slot), a couple more fans, and few other things....

Great job. Congratz. Do not worry about the cables inside, nobody sees it; The outside is fantastic!!

Thanks!.... yeah, I just barely put the side panel on for the first time, and was like, damn! This could pass as a real G5!

When I read how you did with the cables inside I was thinking, this is impossible for me. And some postings later, you ansewered which parts you used for the back side, I start to look among all my stuffs and found a short extension cable for usb, another for firewire 400, a double extension male females for USB, one or the Optical in/out, just missing the Ethernet and extension Audio!! I will give a try to use the original back panel .

Go for it! The end result is very satisfying... if you don't mind the rats nest.

Ok we just saw your POWERMAC G5 now where is your Hackintosh lol, looks goods congrats I'm trying to get the G5 powersupply so I can mod it.

Hello, guys!
First of all, sorry for my english!
Secondly... Well.... All that you do is great! But there are some questions. Ok, Cases are vert beutiful, but they are totaly meshed... What about noise and dust?
Maybe theese questions had been already asked. If so, just excuse me, I am newbee anyway...

Yay! I got the last G5 Skate. It's on it's way. I'll take some photos when it arrives. I wasn't able to add it to the shopping cart, so I emailed powersupport, and they said they only had one left, but they would sell it to me. The rear axle might interfere with my power supply, so If it doesn't fit, I might offer it up here before eBay.

for the bluetooth what card did you use does it work in osx

MSI dual-net card.

The bluetooth works out of the box, and the wifi works with the ralink mac driver. Works great.

My skate just arrived, so I slapped it on my Ghetto-5:

NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!


PLEASE tell me it's a JOKE!?

That's like painting your Harley1475 Pastel Blue with Pink tassles!
SticMAN

Huh? My harley IS pastel blue... but seriously, it's pretty minimal. I thought it was decent looking, and that's why I bought it, but taste is purely subjective. It's obvious that you hate it.

not the biggest fan either.

do that is the nicest, sickest thing i have seen nice props. nice job btw

Yay! Someone other than myself likes the G5 skate! It was part of the plan all along, guess I should have warned you guys I'd be totally ruining my already mod from the beginning


.... but it was the last one.... doesn't that make it a rare and precious collectors item?

oh well, I still dig it. I'm going to get the G5 roof next just for the reactions.....

I love it nervouschimp.
I am busy to make myself a roof with a mesh pannel. I lowered the bottominside of my G5 case to include the pump and PSU . Still to add some piece of mesh pannel to hide the expansion bay.

Edit 26/08/08

Last version of the lowered bottom case :

Since my motherboard is a Full atx its harder for using the original G5 psu so I made this diagram to help me and others. If you have any other ideas please let me know

Click to view attachment

ehh after some looks its not tooooo bad. idk how good the roof will look. but its all about your opinion. your the one who has to look at it haha

More hardware is on the way. I had 2 problems to solve: the onboard sound on the P5E WS Pro is absolute garbage, and 2 hard drive bays is just not going to cut it. So I ordered a few parts:


Turtle Beach Riviera PCI
The C-media chipset on this card is supposed to have working Leopard drivers for output only, originally put together by dogbert.


2 Icy Dock Trays
Since I am going with Icy Dock all around, a few extra of these trays will be good.


Icy Dock portible eSATA
This is a nice lil eSATA portable enclosure, and the HDD trays are interchangeable with the big quad-bay below, allowing me to pop out any drive and take it with me. If someone made something like this for the Mac Pro, that allowed the Mac Pro sleds to be quickly slipped into a portable enclosure, I think they might sell a few.


Icy Dock Quad eSATA
IMO, this is attractive enough to put next to a G5. It looks like it's using the same materials as the Mac Mini: white acrylic and aluminum. It uses 4 separate eSATA connections (one dedicated per drive), which is exactly what I was looking for. I did not want 4 separate eSATA boxes, each with it's own power-brick, that would suck. Anyway, after careful thought I decided against burying more HDDs inside Ghetto-5, and went with the Icy Dock system. Hard drives are cheap enough to treat like zip-drives now, and this makes it easy. Oh, and I prefer that the raid functions are not built in. The box should be transparent to my motherboard/pci-x card. I will get an Areca card soon when I am ready for raid.


Griffin iMic
The iMic will be installed internally, and connected to the line-in port on the back of the G5. I will try to position it where I can easily access the line/mic toggle if I ever needed mic input(something the G5 couldn't do), but I have a decent USB headset, so it will prolly always stay on line level input mode. For now I am planning to run the rear analog line-out off the turtle beach card, but if the output of the iMic is decent, I may use it for the rear-analogue, and use the stereo optical out on the turtle beach for my rear optical port.


4-port eSATA PCI-bracket
This bracket is awesome, because not only does it put 4 esata on 1 PCI bracket, but it allows you to use the cable length that is appropriate for any application, or long cables in my case. For now I will be running the unused sata ports on the motherboard to this bracket.

I'll post photos/first impressions when this stuff arrives.

PS. Yeah, yeah, attaching an Icy Dock is like painting your harley pastel blue with tassels on the handlebars.

nice, yeah the icy dock looks pretty nice, all you need after this is a EFI-X usb adapter.

Very nice stuff. Apple Design influence can be good. Nice choice nervouschimp.

nervouschimp, what's your source for all these jumper cables?

frontx
ebay
datapro.net

Got the sound installed:

I'm really sensitive to feedback and hum, and so is the iMic, so I shielded the iMic and excess analog wire with metal tape.

The turtle beach is also in, and working great.

Man, this case is stuffed. The only available slot is the PCI-X, and it will get filled soon too.

I am still craving more clarity than either of these products can deliver, and I'm dreaming of an Apogee Duet....

And the Icy Dock stuff is pretty cool, but my eSATA bracket doesn't arrive til monday, so I just tested the portable enclosure.

That's a beauty this Icy Dock,nervouschimp, really Apple minded. Very nice choice.
Btw, I forgot to ask something, which kind of cable are you using to get the video connector at the back of the case ? An extended DVI to DVI ? Which label ?

Thanks, Baudouin, and the DVI cables came from:

datapro.net

I've decided to go with 2 velociraptors in raid 0 for my boot volume, powered by an Areca PCI-X card with a 1 terabyte disk for time machine. I'll post an update when the parts arrive. This should just about complete my project.

Thanks for the answer. Have you any idea what's the budget you needed to build your super machine ? Just curious .

Lets just say that it comes in at less than the base, ridiculous, Mac Pro model that ships with only 2gigs of ram, a slow 320gig hard drive, and a crap radeon 2600, but some of my stuff was open box, and waiting for deals. And you can't put a price tag on personal time, it's incredibly valuable.

Yes, it is worth to build it. . And the personal time... I know what you mean.

my dual-velociraptor raid 0 setup went perfect.... and here is my new xbench results:



needless to say, I am really happy. the pci-x areca arc-1120 card has native kernel-level support in leopard. no need for drivers

Those are Hackintosh numbers? Holy {censored}.. usually for osx86 the disk test numbers are around 50-60. A simple raid card + v-raptors gave you 500+????

I know what's going into my hack when I build it

Hey Guys,
Being following the thread, it's being in my bookmarks for a while now so i'm looking at it now because i just bought a Power Mac G5 case on eBay with all the extras included (e.g. PSU cover, front button etc...). My question now, after looking at all this skill shown in this thread is what components should I use? I wouldn't mind running the vanilla kernel so I can update it using Apple Software Update. I'm planning to copy the idea off nervouschimp with cables redirected to the back because I cannot mentally cut a case as well designed as the G5 case Also, i'm building this because I cannot afford a Mac Pro, i'm 16 and i've already got a MacBook Pro so yes I am a Mac user...

Thanks in Advance,
howie

Ok dont get a Motherboard tray for this if you wanna redirect cables to the back. Just Mount with on the G5 lined up with the PCI ports and get a M-ATX and use your PSU Cover open up your psu stick it down their. Then get some Noctua fans stick them on the side. Get a good Heatsink for your north and south bridge, and CPU, Get 2 good hdd's. A nice M-ATX Gigabyte Board. Then Wire up your front panel and put one more noctua fan in the back. I made a little print of how mine is going to look.

Dont rush it take your time as I made that mistake.

Click to view attachment

Thanks for the reply. Any particular Gigabyte M-ATX board you recommend. Just need one that works well with OSX86. Also, any idea if I could create my own cable from the front panel (power button... etc...) to the motherboard, as the cable seems to be missing.

Thanks,
howie

Hot damn, nice job!

Looks really nice, looks just like a Mac Pro!

Also, I see you have the same desk as me

Congratulations.

NervousChimp, your mod is absolutely amazing! It looks like the real deal, especially with the 30" Apple Cinema Display. Anyway, I just wanted to ask you and everyone else a question. I'm looking to install a mATX board in my G5 case, because I want to keep the top shelf intact. I've just got one thing on my mind that I think will be a problem. If I mount the mATX board with the PCI slots at the back, how will I get the cables to match up with the port holes on the back. I don't think there will be enough space!

howie

mATX boards are crap. just front-mount a full-size board.... of course you'd have to expect that answer from me....thanks... haha... it's an ikea desk, and the first one wasn't durable enough to secure the monitor arm, so I bought this one, but it was worth it, a 30-inch on humanscale M7 arm is sooooo nice.....

When you front mount the case as you have done nervouschimp, does that mean you have to remove the top shelf? You mod is awesome, just don't know if i'll be able to do something like that! Plus I don't really want to reck my case, it's designed too well!!! Oh, is it any harder to mount an ATX?

howie :?

[EDIT]
Oh, just noticed you haven't removed the top shelf! My main other concern (apart from how hard it is to mount an ATX is the back case plate) is where the PSU can go. I really don't want to cut my case. Your PSU mod is awesome, but I just don't know if I can do as a clean mod as you have. Any other ideas?

howie
P.S. Awesome monitor and stand...

G5 not MacPro

if you cant tell the difference, i feel bad for you.

Since you're using an ASUS board (P5E?) and a corded alu pro apple keyboard, have you ever had any problems with the BIOS hanging at POST? I ask because I have an ASUS P5K Deluxe and I can't seem to get the keyboard to play nice with this board. It just will not let the machine get past the POST. When I use it with my older Sony Vaio "hac" it works just fine.

No problems at all.

get another 30 incher and your set, that monitor on the G5 would be a nice idea.

I was in Seattle over the weekend, and It turns out a friend of my wife has done a completely passively-cooled G5 mod that utilizes a dual-opteron board.

Heres a couple quick photos I snagged of Jake's passive G5:





All the heat-pipes are routed to the giant heat sink attached to the rear, and any IO is now routed through the PCI brackets. Pretty cool, and completely silent!

Nice, but Xeons are better...

howie

students can't always afford xeons. besides, he doesn't need xeons. he built this box on a tight budget. if someone wants expensive xeons, they might as well get a real mac pro.

but he doesn't run mac OS on it.... he's an XP guy.

.... anyway, the goal here was silent computing.... guess you missed that part...

Soz, just not an AMD guy. Also didn't know he was building it on a budget... nice job though, neat and tidy and by the look of it, mighty silent, especially with that huge heatsink at the back.

howie

Can anyone recommend a good ATX (or mATX) motherboard that works near 100% (or 100%)? Looking to find one for my G5 mod.

howie