G3 Case Compatible Motherboards

[fmlive]

Good news everybody,

 

A friend turned me onto your site and I'm happy to announce I am in love with it. I lurked for a while but now have decided to enlist your help. I have an old G3 case that I want to use to rebuild a intel based PC so I can tri-boot OSX-Windows-Ubuntu. I have been googleing myself to death today and have had no luck finding any resources. The best I could come up with was a guy who twisty tied his AMD board to the G3's mounts. = |

 

Any help is appreciated.

[zwarbo]

I followed the post of the MacBane project.

After I had removed the old standoffs, and drilled the holes for the new ATX motherboard, I purchased some 10mm PCB standoffs and associated screws, I secured the standoffs from the outside with minimal issue.

 

The only tricky part was getting the two holes below the PCI slots to the same thickness. In hindsight it may have been a better idea to cut some length off the two standoffs.

 

I have attached a picture of the standoffs for your reference.

[spackley]

I have a couple of G3's stored for future possible mods and the G3 case is pretty much the same as the G4 except for no cooling fan holes on the case side. They may be other slight differences but nothing too major.

The mod I did on one of my G4 cases G4 is here...

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=218564

You will need a micro ATX sized board as an ATX is just too big. I used an Asus P5QPL-AM on this one but have used an Asus P5KPL-VM before too.

Regarding mounting the motherboard I junked the plastic sliding lock tray entirely and now rely on the sliding lock lever at the top to secure the case side.

This simplifies things a lot and allows you to mount the motherboard lower on the case side giving you a bit more breathing space regarding height of the RAM interfering with other components.

You can secure this sliding lock lever either by spring loading it the opposite way to the original or by putting a lock or similar through the hole as you can see I have done in the pics on the above link.

You can drill out the original stand offs then position your new ones and epoxy glue the new ones in, it sounds a bit gash but it's plenty strong enough to hold everything.

A couple of things you need to do correctly though are as zwarbo says make sure you get the mount height of the motherboard right at the PCI slots or the cards wont fit right. (you should temp fit a couple of cards in the PCI slots when you sort out where to mount the mobo) and make sure you get as short a DVD drive as you can otherwise it could cause fouling problems. The ones I used were 17cm deep.

Good luck with your build and be sure to post pics up here when you are done...

[morrison]

i found the gigabyte boards

G41M ES2L

G31M ES2L

to be very good fitting boards and very adaptable to hackintoshes

[enjoyfebruary]

i found the gigabyte boards

G41M ES2L

G31M ES2L

to be very good fitting boards and very adaptable to hackintoshes

 

I strongly second this reply. G41m-ES2L is great. Also, use a Lite-on disc drive. You'll HAVE to trim the disc rive carrier regardless of what you get but I found that the Lite-On fits well.

[BlackCH]

to solve the DVD-Drive problem you can use a slim drive (for laptops) in a frontal like this:

http://www.sundialmicro.com/silverstone-3-..._2141_1819.html

or

http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/acc/015/Conpane4.html

or

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/product...&lid=628335

 

I guess you will be able to fit almost any uATX board and besides, you get the front USB conections, etc

[morrison]

sure but a full size discdrive is still the way to go if you can.

i think any sata drive has a chance with these two boards. i have a samsung writemaster

 

one thing about the board i have is, it would not hold an overclock, with my q6600. others have said so too.