In a weird twist of fate, my search for an Intel MacPro case has led me down the path of actually building a MacPo. I was originally just going to mod an Intel MacPro case like I did the G5 case. After I found a case and saw it had all the little bits and pieces that tend to nickel and dime a project to death, I got to thinking.

A little searching and I found everything I need to build a MacPro. For all purposes it is a MacPro but I do have to throw my own little touches on it, like water cooling From what people have related to me, the MacPros are not noisy but any way to cut down on noise make me a lot happier

EDIT Due to the size constraints in the case, water cooling is on hold but it will happen. I just need to really research it.

I have been in a frenzy of ordering yesterday and today and awaiting parts so as they come, I will be posting pics and once everything is here, I will do a build log. I am expecting the case, logic board, cpus and the other water cooling block (reusing my existing one but still need two of them) shortly after Christmas. I might go ahead and order the PSU, memory and memory riser cards today as well just debating if I want to stretch my bank account that thin right now.

Here is the break down of what I have spent. I have not ordered the memory just yet but that will be the price.

CPUs (two) 515.00
Case 325.00
Logic Board 782.02
Memory Risers (two) 211.00
Power Supply 301.00
Memory 330.00
CPU Coolers 134.70
Logic board screws 4.00
Leopard 124.99
Mac 7300GT 160.00

Total 2887.71

I am estimating another $200-$250 for the water cooling when that part comes.

Finally having a real Mac Priceless (yes that is SUPER cheesy but I could not resist)

The CPUs are Xeon 2.4 GHz Quad Core 1066 FSB Engineering Samples. They *should* OC to 3.0 GHz with the BSEL mod which will give me 8 cores of 3.0 GHz goodness running 1333 FSB Memory will be 8GB of FB-DIMM. Prices are so low right now it would be silly not to get 8 GBs.

The memory riser cards were 90 each and the PSU was 267 but since it was bought from a company in California I had to pay tax.

I will be re-using my hard drives. I have an IDE dvd-rom which I will use and I am going to see if my boss minds if I swap out my IDE dvd-rw at work with my SATA one. He is cool and will probably say yes so that will save me $30-40 on buying a new one. I am going to try re-using my Asus 7300GT Video Card but not sure if NVinject will work. It will be not biggie to buy an real Mac 7300GT if I need to.

EDIT:
Updated 01-01-2008 Update price list to current totals
Updated 12-23-2007 to add in the price of Leopard. doh!
Updated 12-26-2007 removed water cooling from price list, added in air cooled heatsinks, Apple Remote, Screws and cheesy line
Updated 2-1-2008 Changed price on logic board as the first one was not 100% working and new one cost a LOT more. Also remover Apple Remote from list as it never showed up and my ATI All in Wonder remote works

Sounds interesting, I'll be watching.

Minor update. I went ahead and order 1/2 the Ram (4GB) and should have everything next week so I can get busy. Case arrives tomorrow so I will get some pics of it up and start planning where the radiator and pump for the water cooling will go.

Will look forward to seeing your project. Sounds very interesting. If you are watercooling, it would be interesting to overclock. Someone mentioned that there is an article on overclocking a 3 gig mac pro to 3.15. I will see if I can find it.

Actually I will be over clocking. The CPU's I have found are 2.4 GHZ 1066 FSB (9 x 266) Quad Cores. Using the BSEL mod, you trick the chipset into thinking they are 1333 FSB bringing them to 3.0 GHz (9 x 333). As far as I know, that is the extent of overclocking unless there are some cool EFI hacks I have not heard about.

A whole lot of stuff arrived today! So enjoy some pics as I am getting ready to start building. Pics are not the best as I was in a hurry.

Leopard and my dual 120 rad painted to look nice



Logic Board. This thing is HUGE compared to a standard ATX board. At least it seems that way to me.



4 GB of memory. I listed 8 GB and I will be getting the other 4 GB in a couple weeks.



The case came as well today but there are plenty of pics of MacPro cases around so decided to skip that. I bought the case from another member here and I am very very happy with it. The case is not 100% as the lever for locking the side panel is broken. It is not major thing as there is still a way to lock and unlock the side panel and its not like I am going to be opening it enough where I need the lever. I knew this before buying it. It is fixable. I tried getting the broken pieces out of the case but it was starting to get to the point I might damage something trying to remove the upper shelf so I decide to just let it be as it was not critical.

The CPUs arrived today as well but required a signature so they are patiently waiting for me to pick them up tomorrow at the Post Office. The extra water cooling stuff is scheduled to arrive Friday and hopefully the PSU and memory risers will ship tomorrow.

Mounting the rad and pump is going to be a bit tricky it seems. I might need to find a more compact pump.

whered you get the case from?

wpd7 but he is a who more than a where. Since you said where, ApplePalace.com lists cases for sale under there MacPro parts.

Looking good nagal, going to kick butt when you get done.

A few notes from test fitting parts tonight.It is no surprise that the logic board does not use M3 screws like PC to mount to the stand offs has to b3 M3.5, so I have a bunch of those on order.A 2 x 120 rad will fit inside the case IF I sacrifice the first HD slot. Its hard to tell if that will be a problem or not. It appears two single 120 rads stacked on top of each other will fit. Its the extra height for the where the barbs fit on the dual rad that is the issue. My current pump (Lialang D5) is not going to fit so a Swiftech MCP355 is going to be needed.After some thought. I am going to stick with air cooling for the time being. There is a lot I need to research for the water cooling aspect and do not want to rush it. So I ordered a pair of Thermalright HR-01X to hold me over. It is very possible that the system will be quiet enough and water cooling might not be needed. Of course if it is not needed that is almost more reason to do it!

Some more pics before calling it a night

Couple hard drives in sled waiting to be plugged in. This to me is one of the coolest features of the MacPro case.



Logic board installed in the case. Well only 2 screws holding it in right now but I have a 100 more on their way. Smallest quantity I could get for M3.5 x 8mm but for $4.00 I am not complaining.



I am not expect anything else to show up until Friday and Saturday so no work until then.

Lookin good Nagal,

Do you have a source for the PS, Apple Palace I guess. I have the identical radiator to yours in my Hack Pro. It is a tight fit but it went in and is wedged between the Airport/Bluetooth mounting and the underside of HDD 1. You end up losing HDD 1, but as I connected a E-Sata back plate, I can have 3 internal + 2 External anyway. You can do this on a real mac pro too, as there are two extra Sata ports on the logic board.

What graphics card are you going to use, if you can get a 7800 GTX 512, there is a rom on my site to flash it to Quadro FX 4500. Even better, I think Apple will come out with a Quadro FX 5600 in Jan and it may be possible to flash a 8800 GTX to that. I will be following your project with interest, don't forget lots of photos!!@?

Are you able to use a normal ATX PSU with the mac pro?

Also: Are these(circled in red) RAM slots?

Aqua-Mac,Yes going with ApplePalace to get the PSU and Memory Riser Cards. They were the cheapest place I found and local so only one day shipping. Which is good because they are slow to ship.For video, I have a 2 prong attack I have no massive video requirements so I found a Mac 7300GT on eBay and bought that. Just to see, I am going to try my ASUS 7300GT and see if it will work with NVinject on a non-hackintosh. If it works, cool. If not, to eBay it goes.I eventually would like to get a better card but the project is expensive enough as is. I did check out the ROMs on your site. Oh so tempting No. I do not even think you could mod a standard ATX PSU to work as there are 4 plugs behind the optical drive bay where the PSU plugs in and all power is routed through there. You can get the MacPro PSU for around 275 which is not a bad price when you consider it is a 980W PSU. I wonder if the lights are going to dim when I first turn this on

Dax,

I guess there is no physical reason why you could not use a PC supply with a mac pro, but figuring the wiring would be a challenge. Also the power is split between two banks of main connectors and a few smaller connectors, so the real answer is no. Also there are various sockets up in the psu compartment where a mac pro supply plugs straight in keeping things tidy and simple.

Nagal, you must type faster than me!!!!

Hm..it'd be nice if the mac pro parts could fit in a normal ATX case..$400 for a case is a bit much.

That logic board is a monster, probably a good 4.5 inches longer than an ATX, so I don't think it would fit in any other case + all the IO rear panel issues there would be. I got my case off ebay, but they don't come up very often.

Hack Pro

I am looking for a Mac Pro logic board that is not working as I want to cut off the rear sockets (USB/Firewire/lan/sound) and wire them into my case. If anyone knows where I can find one it would be much appreciated.

watching this thread with interest, good luck with your build

Dax,

what you circled are the slots where the memory riser cards go. Each card has 4 FB-DIMM slots which can take up to a 2GB FD-DIMM for a total of 16 GB of Memory. I ordered my memory riser cards ($90 each) from the same place I got my PSU. As soon as they come in, I will post pics.

So will you keep it or sell it ?

This is a keeper! The whole idea of building it is because I can not afford to buy a MacPro right out and want to go legit with OS X.

Sounds like a plan.
So if you build it and use all mac parts it will be a Mac and not a hackingtosh.

I am not using 100% Apple parts. CPUs are not a spec Apple uses as they are Intel Engineering Samples. Memory is not bought direct from Apple but is Apple Certified. Optical drives are not "SuperDrives" just standard off the shelf dvd-rw and dvd-rom drives. Hard drives are not sizes Apple offered expect for one of them (250GB and two 320GB). The logic board is Apple, case is Apple, PSU is Apple, retail version of Leopard so thats Apple

So it could be argued it is not an "Apple" computer but it is not much different than someone who bought a MacPro and did their own upgrades. To me, it is an Apple.

So can you install OS X in it and not be in trouble?
Don't get me wrong i have no problem with it just wondering out loud.

That is the idea If it install without any hacks straight from the DVD (which it should) then in my opinion that is perfectly legit. Now, I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on the internet but I do not see how it could be against the EULA in anyway.

Well your doing and awesome job so I would not worry about it.

Do you happen to know the dimensions of the Mac Pro mobo? (L,W,H)

15" x 10.5" x 7" . L x W is approx and H is a guess as I am not sure how tall the memory riser cards are but it will not be taller than 7 ".

Picked up the processors today.



So wait, they say 2.4 GHz 1066 FSB? Yes that is correct. These are engineering samples not even OEM chips. They have a 9x clock so with the BSEL mod will bump them to 3.0 GHz 1333 FSB

Here is the dirty on these chips http://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/QQ/QQYK.html

And here is a link to how to perform the BSEL mod http://www.o0o.it/pro/. So easy, its not even funny. Hardest part is going to cutting a piece of electrical tape that thin. It will for sure be an after coffee event.Even if they do not go to 3.0 GHz with BSEL, 8 cores at 2.4 GHz is nothing to be ashamed of I will start things off without modding them and once everything looks good and stable then let the fun begin.

That's in inches, right?

Yes. Sorry about forgetting that.

Note:

Avoid using ApplePalace.com. They state they have items in stock on their website but as I just found out from a phone call its not true as my order was going to be held until Jan 25th because Apple does not have the memory riser cards. Nice of them to inform me of this.

Nagal, just to let you know, I think you can put up to 32gb in a mac pro. BTW, how did you get engineering samples? You shouldn't even need to hack anything because you are using base apple parts (logic board), except flashing your video card.

Everything I have read says the MacPros are limited to 16 GB not that is really a limit to me. Maybe they have changed that to 32 GB now?

I got the engineering samples off of eBay. They show up on occasion there. Yes, there should be no hacking involved at all which will be nice. I am curious if my PC NVidia 7300GT will work using NVinject. Its just curiosity mostly as I have a real Mac NVidia on the way.

OWC sells up to 32gb.

Good to know. OWC is where I got my memory from as well. Their prices are awesome and once I have the cash will get another 4GB from them.

Now is that a screen shot of your MacPro? 32 GB is kind of overkill but at todays prices is not that expensive

No, thats no my mac pro yet, it will be soon . Not really. Just did a google search for "mac pro 32gb." Its not overkill for somethings.

Did a little work last night not much as still waiting for more pieces to arrive. After reading aqua-mac's comments about the two additional SATA ports on the mobo, I dug this out of my box o crap



It slides into any free slot on the PCI cage and turns internal SATA connections into external connections. I really have no need for it right now but figured I would throw it in I had to cut some of the front fan housing away so I could plug in the SATA cables. It also became necessary as Apple uses SATA connectors to connect the front panel USB ports on the front panel board to the logic board. I found it on ApplePalace.com but it was a $30 cable. So I got my mini-hacksaw, removed a piece big enough from the fan housing so I could just use a normal SATA cable.

I will try to get some pics of it later not sure. I did not take pics before hand so now would have to remove some stuff.

My bag of a 100 M3.5 screws showed yesterday so I put in the memory cage and front fan housing. Stupid me forgot to get some LONG M3.5 screws for the memory cage but luckily I found some long 6-32 that only have about 1/8 inch of thread on the very tip. These worked well enough to secure the cage and not strip anything. The cage actually takes 2 very long M3.5 screws then 2 very short M3 screws to secure. I have plenty of M3s so that was not an issue.



There is not much space between the front fan housing and the memory cage. This may be an issue with the after market heat sinks I ordered. I could have gotten the Apple ones but at a little over $100 each, I said no thank you. Worse case scenario is I have to remove the memory cage and fan housing then create a way to mount the fans up front myself. The Apple heatsinks also have a temp probe on them. Way? I have no idea as the Xeons have built in temp sensor. Anyways, another trip to the box o crap and I returned with 2 thermal sensors from an old dual Slot 1 motherboard. I do not see why these will not work but it is a wait and see. No big deal as this is what DIY is all about

So I am waiting on the following

Heatsinks - should arrive today but I may have to wait until Monday if the package is too big to fit in large mailboxes at my apartment complex.
Memory raiser cards - probably arrive Wednesday
Power Supply - who knows, ApplePalace said they were shipping Friday so it should be Wednesday
Video Card - Maybe by Friday

Yes, video card. After doing some research it is highly unlikely my current video card will work AND do to the space requirements would not fit in the first slot which from what I can tell is the only electrical 16x PCIe on the logic board.

Hi Nagal,

This really is coming on nicely! Everyone should have a box o crap!! Unfortunately I seem to have accumulated a lot of them and I never know which one to look in. What heat sinks did you order? You are right, Apple did not leave a load of space there.

Graphics choice is a little limited at the moment on mac pro's

Thanks aqua-mac, I just wish it would come along a bit quicker

I ended up getting Thermalright HR-01X mainly because you can change their mounting direction. It is going to be an interesting fit for sure.

Well they certainly look the biz! If they are too big, maybe you can trim the grey plastic shroud and still be able to keep the fans and support.

Thats what these are for


lol J/K.

They do look a bit big.

lol!

I got the heat sinks today. For some reason the Post Office did not deliver them but a quick call and I verified I could pickup the package at the Post Office. It is odd that the package was there but the carrier did not even attempt to deliver it today. Anyways, I will be getting that $30 back since they failed to deliver in 2 days

Here are the beauties straight out of the box



I quickly found out that these heat sinks were not going to mount into the stock mounting. For one, Apple used M3.5 screws (just like the rest of the motherboard mountings) and the heat sinks came with what appears to be 6-32 which I am taking is standard for Xeons in the PC world. The second thing, was the heat sink mounting was not aligning with the retention brackets on the motherboard. There was no other choice but to come up with my own mounting method but first all the stand offs in the case for the CPUs needed to be removed

Before attack of the pliers



After.... its hard to see the difference



Next I had to spend some time figuring out a mounting method. My main concerns where keeping the heat sinks tight and not bending the board due to pressure and weight. I ended up with a very simple design that looks to provide this. I started by removing the screws that came with the heat sinks for mounting them to the motherboard. Since I no long had stand offs to help support the weight of the heat sinks, I needed screws long enough to touch the case to help provide that support. A trip to the box o crap (not being my first case mod I have LOTS of nuts, bolts, screws) I dug up some socket head 6-32 1.5" stainless steel screws and nuts. The screws were a little too long but bolt cutters quickly fixed that. The box o crap was severely lacking in washer so a quick trip to Lowes and I had a lot of #6 and #8 washers and only $3 lighter in the wallet. My mounting design is simple, a #6 washer fits almost perfect tight into the hole of the motherboard where the retention bracket was. #8 washer is large enough to apply pressure to the #6 washer in the hole AND the motherboard. a nut holds everything in place. The down side of my design is you have to remove the motherboard from the case to remove the heat sinks. Here is a pic of what I am talking about, notice the bottom left mounting shows the #6 washer inside the whole of the mother board. This was just the test fitting. I did apply electrical tape to the side of the #8 washers that touch the motherboard just to be safe.



After the test fitting and seeing it was going to work, time to put it all together. Here is a picture of the CPUs with Shin Etsu thermal grease. Shin Etsu is better (or so it is said) than Arctic Silver 5 and I prefer it as it comes in a little syringe which makes it easier to apply than AS5. I did not do the BSEL mod to the CPUs yet so once everything works, I am going to have to tear it all apart just to do that. I did reapply the thermal grease after the picture was taken since I messed up the bottom CPU.



Both heat sink on



Motherboard back in the case! I thought it was going to be a total pain trying to get the motherboard with the heat sinks attached in but it wasn't at all. The wires hanging over the heat sinks are part of the thermal sensors I mentioned in a previous post, I just have not attached them and secured the extra wiring.



At this point, my camera died so no more pictures. I will say this, the high drain batteries I got at Radio Shack lasted about 10 times longer than normal batteries in my camera. So I know where I am going tomorrow morning

After getting the motherboard in it became apparent the front fan housing AND the memory cage were not going to just fit back in. I spent my time focusing on the memory cage first. The memory cage is kind of useless. Its main function seems to be to direct air flow across the memory and provides some minor support for the memory risers. I know Apple engineers its Pro case very well but the case is so open air flow to any components should not be an issue, that is why I *think* the memory cage is a bit useless. Luckly, the fan on the rear of the memory cage is easily removed from the cage. The fan assembly also has the guides/supports for the memory raisers so I will have at least 1/2 of those. I have already figured out how to mount the rear fan without the memory cage. Not sure if this makes any sense but I hope to get some pictures up tomorrow once I get some more batteries.

As for the front fan housing, I will probably ditch it completely and come up with a way to mount the 2 front fans without it. I really wanted to keep as much as possible intact but its a DIY project so improvise is the key

I solved part of my front fan problem. The heat sinks came with some wire clips that are made just for mounting a fan to the heat sink. So, why re-invite the wheel? I have some ideas on how to mount the other fan off of the fan on the heat sinks just need to make a trip to the hardware store tomorrow to hunt down some materials.


I managed to get one more picture out of my batteries so here is the one fan attached.

Great pictures, keep them coming! Those sinks look awesome and the attachment method you have come up with was a good bit of thinking on your feet, good ole box o crap I say!

On my Hack Pro, for the rear fan, I simply drilled 4 holes in the rear fan housing and used some socket head bolts to bolt it to the housing, then refitted that to the case.

If you cut the memory housing at the front, can you still use it, or will you have to remove too much for it still to be useful?

The heat sinks are monsters . lol

Looking good!

Your heatsinks certainly have a bit more muscle than these std jobs:

Rear fan done but still working on the front fan as my first idea did not work. Not too surprised as it was expecting too much of those wire clips. I will post some pics later I am off to the hard ware store for front fan mounting idea #2 as the box o crap let me down on this one