zeppfrog Posted December 30, 2015 Share Posted December 30, 2015 Ok, Maybe I am the last one in the world still playing at this game. But, A LOW BUCK LOW BOY: POWERMAC G5 MOD ON A BUDGET YAY! A $10.00 powermac G5. ebay presented me with a shiny used G5, AND it was local, so pick up was immediate and close to free. In fact a dual 2ghz machine, so Not only do I get my project case, I got to upgrade my dual 1.8ghz G5. Well, that part went pretty smooth once the ram was in its paired spots and was all read by the OS. Ok, Intentions. This my second G5 Case mod. My first was a full ATX and after my first attempt giving me a little satisfaction, I let it lay for quite awhile. Then, since the MB flopped loose from the JB weld, and I didn't have any guitars to overhaul at the moment, I cleaned all that up, raiding a donor for a Motherboard plate and i/o plate. anyways, it went pretty well considering. Now I can tackle my main PC. It is a micro ATX. I really wanted one that I could keep the back as pro looking as possible, with the correctly placed power supply and all the fans and plastic sheilds inside, including the G5 cpu cover. My first case came completely empty, aside from the top shelf, hdd rack and one of two working fans for the same. But this one was complete, with a 600 watt PSU ( by LiteON ) My internals consist of an ASROCK N68-S3 UCC motherboard, AMD athlon II X4 635 cpu @2.9ghz, 4 gig ddr3 ram,seagate 500gig sata2 hdd, HP sata DVDR/RW and laser print optical drive. Nvidia Geforce GT430 W 1GB. Just a basic little pc package good for my needs. GATHERING THE TOOLS AND PARTS I have to say, as with the G4's, it is sometimes really hard to get going on these mods. I really admire the engineering and aesthetics of these PowerMac's. So, jig saw it is. Along with all my basics. Stanley 25ft Caliper, many sizes of phillips screw drivers, a couple flat heads for basic prying jobs and wriggling out stripped phillips heads. Masking tape, Duct Tape (just in case), Bench grinder, Dremel, allen wrenches, soldering iron, solder and heat shrink tubing (this time in advance). Also a small gathering of donor machines at hand and all my extra cables rounded up for connection fittings to the motherboard. GETTING STARTED Obviously, a semi tear-down was first in order. Remove the Covers, CPU's with heat-sinks. Top shelf and PSU still in place, stage one is to get the back cut with initial guesstimates. This leaves a little room for adjustments later. Now having an I/O plate from a doner Dell (this was just the lucky one under my table) that had an MATX. This was a p4 Dell I think, one that didn't use Rambus ram. I mention this because not all Dell's will make a good donor. They really suck for moving things, almost as bad as Apple. Anyways, that and my mock-up MATX MotherBoard I went about positioning it for clearance, I/O position and making sure the shelf, fans and covers were going to clear. I really didn't want to move those rear fans, but alas, there just isn't enough room. I tried the motherboard as close to the back as I possibly could, less than 1/4", and it looked hopeful, but as soon as I tried to insert a expansion card, I could see this was a no go. I would have to fold or cut off the ends of every cards metal plate to get that to work and still just not enough room for the I/O cover to snap in properly. Now, you can do that, and it will go together, if you don't care about those little negatives. My thought is this though. It takes a lot of time to do this. I will keep the case long after its parts and want it capable for the next rebuild. IE: I wan't it easy to upgrade later. So, I shifted the fans 1/2" further away from the I/O doorway. Incidentally, if you measure the little holes horizontally, they are 1/4" center to center. That made it easier to align my cuts and re-cut the holes with a jig saw. One thing to keep in mind, to hopefully avoid pitfalls, I leave the rear I/O panel loose well into the layout process. This will allow me to adjust it to everything else without any major hiccups. MOVING THE REAR FANS At this point it is worth mentioning, it is much easier to draw lines on masking tape than it is holes, aluminum, steel or plastic. You will notice a lot of masking tape. After marking my rear fan holes to be cut, using a cutout from the holes from previous mentioned G5, I fine tuned them with a dremel and sanding bit. Remember, cut metal is sharp. Not only can you cut yourself, but you can ruin a good sanding bit. After a refit, I got the fans to fit nicely in their new home. The screws on this one were a bit on the soft side and took some effort to get out, also, countersunk. The original holes were slightly smaller and beveled for them. They will pull right through the other holes. I was lucky to have some screws with heads from some old radio projects to re attach the fan plate. Now, taking the cut offs, I filled in the space left over. Incredibly, if you line up the screw holes I mentioned, then you can screw them right back on the plate. careful not to bend them. You want them flush with the rest of the backing to fill them with JB Weld. I went ahead and put my knee on mine. I don't need anything going that smooth. Double check some fitments. All looking good. Now, pull the fan plate. Mask the inside of the area where you will fill, if you feel you need to. Of course, I didn't, but the JB Weld did droop in. I put my plate in and then masked all the way around the cut, not even an 1/8" of metal showing. mixed my JBW and filled in the cut line. I plan to sand out and redrill the holes that are filled. The next I/O cut will go right across the edge of these cuts. So let it dry the full 6 hrs (JB Weld kwik) REAR FAN HOUSING After giving it 15 minutes or so, I refitted the motherboard, shelf, fans and covers. All was on track. The rear fan housing needed 1/2" cut off where it is next to the door. I marked on tape, cut it straight with a jig saw, then used the remnant to mark the rounded corners. Finished cutting and sanded smooth. MOUNT THE MOTHERBOARD That out of the way, I cannot be held back by drying times. Time to fit the motherboard stand-offs. In my case, I had some stand-offs from a former G4 mod that were perfect height. Also some normal ones, but I didn't feel like cutting off their threaded shafts. I mounted them to the Mock-up MB, filed the backsides coarse so this time the JB Weld would stick. Set the MB in place and then I wiggled it against the back of the case. The coarse stand-offs made my marks on the case for me. Then I used some 60 grit to rough up the area where they would be adhered. Mix, glob on the stand-offs, still on the MB, and set it in place. I pressed it down firmly then placed some weight on it to hold it all down. Make some adjustments to the pci fan shelf, looks like one screw will still work. and the stand-offs are set. POWER SUPPLY UNIT After about an hour, I came back and removed the MB and pulled the PSU. YAY, a 600 watter. Again, Lucky me. Here are some PSU (and general electronics) tips. those round things that look like batteries. Those are electrolytic capacitors. Those can KILL you. You get my drift? The bigger they are, the more bite they have. You can easily discharge them, short their connections with a screwdriver, light bulb , diode, anything. DO NOT touch them, DO NOT open electronics while they are plugged in. Now, see those things with copper coiled around them? Some are chokes, Some are Transformers. in our case, they transform 110v (or 220v) down to 25v(apple) 12v, 5v and 3.3v. Would you believe, these also have the potential to remove your heartbeat? Nobody is tryin to scare you, just keep in mind, electricity don't care how cool anyone is, it will kill you. This is a fairly easy mod, but after what I tol ya, you know I can't be responsible fo ya. Disclaimer done. Now, in our case, you need to know this. APPLE PSU does not, in any way shape or form, apply ATX to its psu pin-outs. SO, forget the Apple pin-outs. You don't really need them. What you need is to look at the PCB the PSU is built on and notice the voltages. Yellow=12v Red=5v Orange=3.3v, and ATX is the same. In addition, Apple has a White= 25v which I am going to desolder and remove, since ATX doesn't use 25v anywhere. Also, there is the power on. Apple used the green wire here. There are a few others, Blue is -12v, white with yellow is a Tach wire for the PSU fans, and a few others. I will share a pic. First things first. The wires that go to the HDD/DVD are fine. Already done and seperate. I have two other connectors. one A 24pin, the other is a 16pin. We won't be using either. In fact, I will desolder both. They won't be long enough and aren't correct for our needs. I plan to pull what I need from an atx PSU and solder it direct to the pcb at the needed length and close it all up with no extra wires to catch dust. Since P3 covers my drives, 2 sata(1) hdd, 1 molex for DVD, that leaves me with my ATX 24-pin, 4-pin 12v, and connections for the additional fans. Personally, I am not about to throw that load on the motherboard. Planning is a "fly by the seat or yer pants" concept to me, but I want to be in the playing field before I seal this up again. Probably the drive bay fans to the motherboard. That is the closest and not an exceptional power load. I want to make the inner CPU fans hot swap, as original, and that leaves the rear fans and the I/O fan. Power Supply Conclusion Well, That was a huge pain. De pinning multiple connectors with a staple. De soldering the apple psu wires consisted of drilling many of them out. The are sleeved and my iron just wasn't hot enough. I spent a solid day at it yesterday and a few ours finishing up this morning. Not sure I would go that route again. At this point, it's back in the case but untested. One area of uncertainty is the "Power-On" gray wire. I read a couple different methods. Straight 5v is the general application. But I am going to try it on apples 5v Sense. One reason is that you quickly run out of room for 5v wires on the pcb. Since I didn't have the sleeves to go into the board, I ended up drilling an additional hole to get all my 5's in there. In the end, there is barely enough room to squeeze all the wires back out the single hole. I may revisit that with a new hole and a plastic sleeve. Now to load up the motherboard and see if I get a success or melted motherboard / PSU. SUCCESS... COOLING Without running off the rails of the thought train, in the back of my mind is how these 4 new CPU fans will interact with the one cpu fan already present on the CPU of my ATX motherboard. On my other mod, I moved the rear fans to the front, and have all the fans, those two, the PSU and drive bay exhausting out the front. No fans in the rear. Only the cpu fan acts differently. This creates a negative pressure and it runs between 90 and 104 degrees F depending on load. Not bad cooling. This one will take some study once it is running. I will point out, for all Apples effort, the G5 didn't have the best cooling results. In two of mine, with the plastic door in, they would overheat and freeze up. Removing the inner door opened up the fans to 12v and they would operate without problem. Again, my first G5 mod fans are running 5v just fine. Initially, only running the cpu, psu, and Graphics fans, idling at cpu 31C (85f) , MB 31C (87F), Drive 31C (87F), Graphics Card 30C (85F)... Altogether excellent. It is very comfy in room temp. probably 75 +/-. Have only monitored about 20 minutes but temps appear very stable so far. And that is with all the G5 case candy in place. CPU COVER, Plastic Door and Main Door. Also, the fans are set in place, further restricting flow I am sure. Purring very quietly. WRAPPING IT UP. The two lower CPU fans are wired in at 5v, using the "power" and 12v connections spliced together and ground into a 5v molex lead. Still running quite cool. Have the pci fan pre-wired, and may tag it into the front CPU fan power lead. The front and rear CPU fans are on two separate molex connections. Wiring in the drive fans is no great task, but I don't want then pulling a full 12v from the mobo chassis fan connection. The hot swap on Front CPU Fan is functioning. The front panel was very tedious and time consuming. I had a hard time finding the connectors I wanted and had to improvise a few. This time I Removed the Firewire connections (except the ground) from the connector to clean things up. All splices soldered and shrink tubed. All the wiring lays to the back of the case and is fairly out of the way. The ATX mobo connection does stand tall in front of the CPU fan, but the cover hides it nicely. All in all, if I don't get crazy and cut into the face of the case to add card readers and fan controls, this baby is done. One pretty nice perk, the power LED is acting right this time around. Plugged the power+ , power- and led+ only. Wasn't sure of which wires went where on the mobo, so I WINGED it and got lucky first try. front headphone/mic and USB all good, but windows is not seeing USB2 for some reason. I imagine something to do with the little boards circuitry, but it still works. SUMMARY. Overall, with the experience of my first build and getting the case work done in advance, once the PSU was sorted, it all went together in just a few minutes, less the little bit of wiring left to do. Since my DVDR was SATA I had to whip up a quick adapter for that. Swap out the SATA drive cables, originals were entirely too short. But it all bolted right up. Luckily I did leave the rear panel loose for final fit, it was just slightly too high. But having planned for adjustment it was no biggie. The absolute hardest part was the PSU rewire. very tedious. Next round, Just remove the guts and pull an ATX PSU from its case and mount it inside. I have seen so many people cut down the atx psu case and mount metal and all inside. I don't get that. Just more metal to restrict cooling to me. easy enough to add some spacers into the apple casing and mount down the board. Well, my OS is on the monitor, Windows 7, since I like to use my hardware, such as my usb wireless network and keyboard/mouse. Not even thinking about the insides. I did have Maverick running on it at one time, but was just more trouble than it was worth. Lost a 500gig hdd and a few gigs of ram before that was over. Any questions, I will try to answer. And I will get a few more images up later 2 Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/310104-g5-lowbuck-lowboy-donor-pile-case-mod/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
zeppfrog Posted January 7, 2016 Author Share Posted January 7, 2016 Well, My first update, This mac hack is still running fine. Problem, 3 shiny macs and no OS X= just wrong. So, since the case completion, I have been stepping through my old trashy OS X hacks, arrived at a temporary stall on Snow Leo, lion was just a non starter (though now I probably have a shot). ML, too clunky still on my rig. But after several attempts. Mavericks is going on my athlon64 x2 box. Dual booting with SL. Missing PCIRootUID=1 was just hitting the kernel and restarting. But that sorted, Mavericks is smooth as Butter. If Yosemite and El Capitan don't use any more resources, I may be adding those to the New mac hack above. Thanks for all the guys n gals who contributed tutorials and files to make this possible. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/310104-g5-lowbuck-lowboy-donor-pile-case-mod/#findComment-2203730 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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