My own Hackintosh G5 Mod

[LuukRost]

Hello fellow Hackintoshers,

 

I’ve seen a lot of Hackintoshes on the internet and decided to make my own combining all the (in my opinion) best mod idea's i’ve seen so far. After a bit of research i found a semi-clean G5 case with a broken logic board. When i went to pick it up, the dude who sold it to me also noticed he had a Cinema Display, unfortunately without the power brick. I, without knowing how rare and expensive the bricks were, bought it along with the case, because i wanted the original “apple feeling” and thats pretty hard staring at a Dell of ASUS monitor when compared with the ACD. Seeing as i am a dutch native, there might be some spelling errors. 

After spending quite some time on this and similar forums looking for compatible components i chose the following components:

 

Motherboard : Gigabyte H77-DS3H

Processor : Intel i5 3570

Processor cooler : Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo + Noctua 120mm Fan 

Ram modules : Ballistix Tactical 8GB(2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz CL8

Graphic card : Gainward GTX 770 Phantom 2GB

Solid State Drive : 256 GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD

Harddisk : 2x 2 TB HDD

Rear Case fan : 2x Noctua 92mm

Fan Controller : Scythe Kaze Q Black

Bluetooth adapter : Sitecom CN-516

Network card : TP Link WN851N

Powersupply : Cooler Master B600

 

Money spent sofar:  €435

 

 

My main goal was to make a fast, quiet dual boot Hackintosh, Windows 7 for gaming and OSX because i prefer the OSX GUI over Windows (and because i was making a G5 mod, OSX was kind of mandatory). I know the 3570 had a -k version which is an unlocked CPU and can be over clocked but its going to primarily be a gaming pc on Win7 and iWorks, browsing and occasional small editing projects in OSX. I don't really care of the extra CPU speed, besides i find a lot more heat and noise not outweighing the benefits of those couple of extra Mhz. 

 

 

LETS GET STARTED

Right, i’ve got the case, and being the stereotypical poor student that i am, i scraped enough money together to buy the motherboard, the fans and controller and the PSU to start off with the mod. I’ve seen a lot of mods where they cut the rear I/O panel and fan shield to later replace that with a custom made aluminium sheet but since i was going for the “apple feeling” i was (and still am) reluctant to cut into the case.

 

 

CLEARING THE CASE

After a ridiculous amount of puzzling, being stubborn as i am, (i didn't want to use any guides besides it was broken anyway) i got the Motherboard out of the case and removed the rest of the components. I continued with the removal of the top shelf, the motherboard standoffs and other weird looking pins. What i was left with, was a completely empty case. 

 

 

 

Now to place the ATX standoffs. I grounded myself, touched both the case and the motherboard, so as to remove any static electricity, i placed my motherboard inside the case and pushed a marker through each on of the screw holes. I had also bought a 150 piece screw and bolt set including motherboard standoffs. I combined the new motherboard standoffs with a spacer and a nut. After i had 7 of them, i proceeded to epoxy glue them to the backplate using the marks of the marker as reference points. After i glued them into place i reassembled my motherboard back onto the new standoffs to check the alignment. I left the glued standoffs, with the motherboard with a couple of books for weight on it, to dry.

 

 

 

PSU

I then turned my attention to the power supply. It had a nasty-looking dusty interior, which i removed. To go for a clean look, i wanted to install the new Coolermaster PSU in the old PSU box. After some careful disassembly and some soldering the PSU fitted perfectly in the box. I found the old PSU stock coolers to be too loud for the quiet build i was going for, so i replaced them with two 60mm ultra silent cooling fans.

 

 

 

THE CASE FAN

The stock case fans were also a bit too loud for my taste so i replaced them with 2 Noctua 92mm fans, one pulling the hot air from the CPU cooler and another one pushing cool air through the case. The CPU cooler and GPU card are going to be placed pushing hot air towards those fans and out the case. After all the fans were in place, they were routed to the Scythe Kaze fan controller.

 

 

APPLE CINEMA DISPLAY

After finding out the power bricks costed more than what i had spent on the case and monitor (!!!) i did a bit of googling and found a mod. The screen is powered by a 65watt PSU at approx. 24 volts. Universal laptop chargers are 90w. and about 24v. I think you can guess where this is going.

 

 

 

After i soldered everything together i found out my Universal adapter cycles through the voltage when there isn’t a connector tip connected. This resulted in 5 seconds of display and than the short-short-long power error. Back to the drawing board.

 

I later found another universal adapter with a manual volt regulator. After redoing the entire thing of testing which wire was positive and negative with the voltmeter i soldered everything back up and wrapped it in tape. This time the trick worked!

 

 

The rest is yet to come. Since i am on a very tight school schedule and tight funding, i actually have very little time to mod the case and continue the build, so it’s gonna be a couple of weeks till the next update. 

 

See y'all in a few weeks! let me know what you think so far!

tips and tricks are always welcome

 

(Edit - Spelling errors)

[shiftysamurai]

Anything happen with this since the first post?

[Niko-Studio]

Hello LuukRost,

 

Just looking at your G5 modification and read that "I’ve seen a lot of mods where they cut the rear I/O panel and fan shield to later replace that with a custom made aluminium sheet but since i was going for the “apple feeling” i was (and still am) reluctant to cut into the case".

 

According to me it's a respect of the true and original APPLE design, but it's a little complicated compared to the classic ATX box ready to be used.

 

Niko-Studio