Homebrewing a Developer Transition Kit Replica

[Sadamune]

With all the attention that the various hacks of the Developer Kit OSX Install DVD have been getting recently, I was wondering if anybody had seriously considered assembling a replica of the actual Developer Transition Kit in order to circumvent as many of the hardware compatibility problems as possible. As most of the components of the DTK are off-the-shelf PC hardware, I thought it would be a interesting project to build a "homebrew" DTK that matches the real thing as closely as possble, thus avoiding at least some of the problems like chipset compatibility, SSE, etc.

 

So far, there seems to a general consensus that the closest commercially available motherboard to the DTK motherboard labled "Barracuda" is the intel D915GUXLK. Are there any dissenting opinions about whether this motherboard is really the closest thing out there?

 

I don't think Apple literally used the D915GUXLK because I've compared photos of the D915GUX series motherboards and the Barracuda motherboard, and the Barracuda seems to have an extra SMD chip. Has anyone identified this "extra" chip on the Barracuda? I'm thinking that the Barracuda motherboard is a derivative of the D915GUX series and is probably unique to Apple's DTK machines.

 

As for the known components of the DTK...

 

 

intel Pentium 4 660 Prescott 800MHz FSB 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 EM64T Processor

 

Western Digital WD1600JB 160GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive (according to AppleInsider's screen shots)

 

SONY IDE DVD Burner Model DW-Q28A (according to AppleInsider's screen shots)

 

Two sticks of DDR2 533MHz 512MB RAM

 

Modified Power Mac G5 enclosure

 

 

Did I missing anything? Also, does anyone know if the hole layout in a standard G5 case can except microATX motherboards? Did Apple drill new holes in their DTK case in order to accommodate the intel motherboard?

 

If I can scrape enough funds together, I'll begin to build this DTK replica I have in mind and post some photos of the result.