DoctorEvil 30564's Powermac G4 Graphite Hackintosh

[minihack]

Looking good Doc.

Hopefully that fan should now keep it in check. The inside of those G4s can get a bit toasty without one......

 

[doctorevil30564]

Looking good Doc.

Hopefully that fan should now keep it in check. The inside of those G4s can get a bit toasty without one......

Well after running all night with seti@home running on it, it didn't go over 49 degrees Celsius, which is a major improvement. Before it would get up to around 60 to 65 degrees Celsius.

Much, much better

 

[Jeronimo2000]

from a company called the laser hive, I had them custom make it for me, so you'd have to contact them and ask them to make up the same kit for you that they made for me.

Wow, that is awesome! Thanks a million for this tip and your whole project, I got the same case sitting around here. Been too lazy to get a start on it, but this kit looks like just the ticket.

 

[doctorevil30564]

Wow, that is awesome! Thanks a million for this tip and your whole project, I got the same case sitting around here. Been too lazy to get a start on it, but this kit looks like just the ticket.

Be sure to check out all of the other awesome powermac G4 mods in this forum too. Mine had to have help with a kit as I'm not a very skilled modder.

 

[eelhead]

Looks great!!
Nice work with it, someday I'll do a G3 or G4 lol but until then I will have to finish all my other side works.

 

[doctorevil30564]

thanks I am glad it turned out so well.

I am thinking about using the G5 mod components from Laser Hive to do my G5 mod when I get ready to do that one, hopefully sometime next year after I get my Income tax refund back. I've had quite a few medical expenses this year so I have more than enough this time to be able to claim it as a deduction on my taxes. My out of pocket expense on my hospital stay after they diagnosed another blood clot in my left leg (previous one happened back around 1999 in same leg), and also found out that I was type 2 Diabetic and had to put me on medications,etc for it was over 2800 dollars, plus adding in all of my out of pocket expenses for buying my medications, follow up doctor visits, yada yada yada should help make for a nice 2k+ refund for me.

Right now I'm using my current Mountain Lion install on the 120GB hard drive as a guinea pig to see if I can move the mac hfs+ partition that starts in the middle of the drive (as the first part of the drive contained my old lion install and that partition got deleted after I got ML running with no issues) to the beginning of the hard drive.

If it works I may do a writeup on it as noone was able to give me a better method to try over in the ML desktop support section, I figured what the hell worst case I can restore my old Lion backup DMG file that I saved prior to splitting the drive and using the second partition to install ML and then just rerun the installer again from my unibeast created ML installer USB disk.

I love to tinker with stuff, so it's a good experiment for me.

 

[Olli73]

Hello there,
Skimming through the posts, i happened to stumble across Your G4 mod. I´ve decided that it´s time to commit my venerable eMac to it´s well deserved rest. I want to do a case mod, just like yours (i also discovered those amazing kits from Laserhive) and was wondering if You could help me along the way with a few things.
I have grown quite fond of hibernating my macs, am i right to understand, that with your custom switch one can still use that function?
Also, what mATX-Board/CPU-Combo would You recommend at this time, as you said in the beginning that this was kind of a budget machine?
I was planing on mainly using OSX 10.6 (because of Rosetta) and maybe later install 10.7 on a second partition.

Thanks, Olli73

 

[doctorevil30564]

Hello there,
Skimming through the posts, i happened to stumble across Your G4 mod. I´ve decided that it´s time to commit my venerable eMac to it´s well deserved rest. I want to do a case mod, just like yours (i also discovered those amazing kits from Laserhive) and was wondering if You could help me along the way with a few things.
I have grown quite fond of hibernating my macs, am i right to understand, that with your custom switch one can still use that function?
Also, what mATX-Board/CPU-Combo would You recommend at this time, as you said in the beginning that this was kind of a budget machine?
I was planing on mainly using OSX 10.6 (because of Rosetta) and maybe later install 10.7 on a second partition.

Thanks, Olli73

I've always turned the sleep functionality off on my hack systems that I run OSX on, but that's because way back in the day sleep functionality didn't work very well on most of the compatible motherboards,etc. Due to this I really can't advise on if sleep functionality works fully as I turn it off and don't use it. I think that it would probably work ok though but the power led on the case wouldn't pulse when the system is in sleep mode, but you should probably ask about the sleep functionality in one of the other forum sub groups to make sure that it will work on whatever system configuration you are looking at purchasing before making your order.

for a recommended motherboard I'd check the 2012 customac buyers guide found here for a suitable micro atx motherboard.

for a truly budget system you can either go with one of the recommended core I3 cpu chips listed in the guide, or if you don't plan on using the onboard video and plan on using a compatible video card you can opt for one of the socket 1155 pentium series or celeron series chips.

I personally went the second route when I built my powermac G4 system as I had a compatible nvidia GTS 250 1GB video card that works great with OSX. Because of this I chose the Intel Pentium G620 which is a dual core 2.6 GHz cpu which doesn't have the turbo boost functionality or hyperthreading functionality that the more expensive cpu chips have.

I'm in the process of buying parts to build my next windows 7 only gaming system and for that build I went with a Gigabyte Z77-D3H motherboard and a Intel Xeon E3-1245 which is very similar to a Core I7 2600K with the exception that the multiplier is locked. it does hyperthread using the 4 cpu cores for a total of 8 threads available and it has turbo boost which allows it to max out at 3.6 GHz as opposed to the stock 3.3 GHz

 

[doctorevil30564]

have you considered doing a Emac case conversion mod? I've seen a lot of Imac G3 and G4 mods but haven't really seen many emac case conversions. You might not want to do it though if your emac is still working properly.

 

[Olli73]

Hello,
Thanks for Your comprehensive answer! Today i ordered my G4 case and contacted the people at The Laserhive. I´ve also done some thinking on my system. I believe this should work:
- GA-Q77M-D2H
- Intel i3 2125
- ASUS GT640-2GD3
- 8 Gb Memory (Corsair or Kingston)
- be quiet! Pure Power CM L8-430W

Obviously the list is not complete yet...^^. I plan on using OS X 10.6 for now and hope that i don´t run into trouble later on, when i want to add to 10.7 or 10.8 on another partition...
As for my eMac, as such it still runs just fine and some of its slowness might be due to the screen-spanning i´m doing right now( i think it´s a bit hard on the GPU.). I plan to give it to my GF, she just wants to use it for surfing the net, movies and uni stuff.
Thanks again for Your help, i´m no stranger to tinkering with macs, but all this os-hacking-stuff is new to me. I only flashed my PSP and my mobile up to now, so this is a new world to me.

Olli