I tried hard, but by the end I gave up: The clearance between the ATX connectors and the physical metal of the Mac case is about 15 mm or even less, so any type of patch wiring will stick out of the connector panel by some amount, while a socket mounted to the Apple back panel extends some good amount to the inside, so you have to be in a very lucky position, that the connectors and the sockets don´t collide in the little clearance you have available. My original intent was to also keep the rear in original shape, I had seen some modifications, where folks have come up with patch wiring and have put sockets in the original locations for USB, Ethernet, Audio and so forth. So a piece of 1mm sheetmetal of 280 by 190 mm essentially needed holes for ATX standoffs and some holes for the “original processor support plate” pattern, and here we go, a mATX board is in position, detachable, no Epoxy glue or alike. While I had been grinding them away with a Dremel last time I tried a different method this time: Take a robust tube, which fits tightly over the studs and break them off the plate with some gentle wiggling, the studs come off very easily!īy virtue of the the very low mounting studs, which had been holding the detachable processor support plate you have now “built in” mounting positions for your ATX motherboard tray. After removal of some 3 or 4 standoffs, which don´t fit the ATX locations anyway you have a roughly 280 by 190 mm flat open space. In this 2005 model the processor mount structure is DETACHABLE from the body, in a matter of minutes you can take out the little metal frame, cut off the “backwards facing” part (see picture). Fortunately a mATX board fits very nicely when lining up with the extension slots and the front part of the original processor / fan holding structure can stay in position. Step two, preparing the motherboard mount.Īs stated before I did want to keep as much of the “infrastructure” to keep the looks. The drive supply cable of the Mac (for hard disk and DVD drive) happened to be long enough to be rerouted to half way under the mother board, so adding a mating Molex pin header, voila, there is power in the drive compartment completely invisible. One of the 12V/5V drive cables I cut down and left just ONE Molex socket to be available. This supply came with a whole bunch of cables for multiple disk drives, floppy drive, both SATA and IDE type of connectors but no cable management, so I was tempted to cut off all surplus wiring, by the end I did NOT and tugged them away in a corner of the pretty large Apple PSU box, just in case in need some for later. The ATX supply was a no name 430W model with 120mm top blowing fan I had sitting on the shelve. I replaced the original fans with NoiseBlocker 60 mm devices, which are providing enough airflow through the PSU case without nerve wrecking sound. The 2005 model has solid copper bars feeding sideways to the motherboard, so that was kind of cool to use as a opening for the harness, no major metal work to be done. Taking out the original power supply PCB, placing an ATX PCB on 4 short M3 standoffs, fixing the compensation inductor to the base, extending the power inlet wiring, a little shrink tubing, keeping the Apple noise filter in place and opening just a little space in the isolation rubber profile to feed out the ATX harness out of the case pointing straight up to where the ATX board has the connector. Dual boot El Capitan/Win7 with Clover in EFI mode on single SSDĬonverting the PSU was pretty much straight forward.1 NoiseBlocker X1 80mm fan for the PCIe extension slot area.2 NoiseBlocker XR1 60mm fans for the PSU.Exsys EX 16450 firewire PCIe card (works OOB with El Capitan!).beQuiet cooling tower with 120mm low noise fan.integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 = upgrade with additional Graphic Card in planning.So it was time to make it fit to an adequate case and here we go. The main board (a Gigabyte H97) was already in service as Hackintosh system for a good year, in a decent, but not quite appropriate PC style case considering an almost all Apple household. (My other G5 case came as an empty shell, so I did not have quite as much options) This time I wanted to take it one more step to keep the looks inside as well as to the outside. In fact the unit was fully working, but compared to todays standards it was kind of slow, so with a little heartburn I took it down to the metal to start the work. By accident I got a hold of complete G5 “late 2005” on ebay for a bargain. Last weekend I finished up on my second conversion of a Power Mac G5 Case to accept a mATX motherboard. Building a CustoMac Hackintosh: Buyer's Guide
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