A case of G4 Cube fever

[spence4]

You are absolutely right that he does have the same heatsink as I do, but unfortunately he has no pics of the underside of his board. Probably wouldn't matter as it is a different board anyway. So I have the sink sitting on some standoffs now, but they need to be about have as tall for contact. I am thinking about removing the parts of the brackets that are trouble. My question about doing that was about whether having four unconnected points supporting the sink is a problem when the default is to have two point connected to each other with the brackets on the back. By breaking these two connections am I taking a way support and risking potential damage to the mobo or CPU?

 

[minihack]

Sorry I misread, didn't see you were talking about the cross brace bracket that some heatsinks have.

If it is possible I'd just space the back bracket away with a plastic washer or two if that'll work and still let you retain it. If not and there is no way to keep the bracket without damage then it's your call really. I'd expect that getting rid of the bracket and going with some standoffs of the right height would work just fine.

 

[spence4]

Switch works. Totally effed up what you warned me about... the grounding. The thing kept starting and stopping so I took a random wire to the case. Nothing. Then I read your bit about the black plug of a molex and boom. It worked. I'm trying to decided whether to even rig up the LED as it would involve soldering that could end up making a mess and really how important is having the power LED on a computer on anyway? My temps are pretty crappy... I seem to idle in the low 40s that is without the thing in the cage but with the noctua fan blowing across the heatsink. Once I get everything in the cage, I don't think the fan will be hitting the copper heatsink straight on so that combined with the confined space and I may be looking for a new cooling solution. Anyway, it's like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. I am very happy about the switch as I bought just a cube, no power supply or anything from a guy on Craigslist. I figured it was 50-50 that it would still be working. Only major business left is to cut out the space for my i/o plate. I am going to try to be very careful so I don't need to use any JB weld, I'm guessing that won't happen, but it's good to have dreams. I will post some pictures of everything once I am done since that seems to be what people do here.

 

[spence4]

Minihack,

I tried googling my Broadcom BCM94321MC card and got no where. When I go into system profiler it shows up as apple branded and says Airport Extreme. Sometimes when I first power up, I actually have my network to choose in the drop down list, but I get a connection failed immediately after entering the password. Then next time I look it is not there. Again have the grey bars, with the option to turn wifi off. However in System profiler it says that wifi is off. No idea what to do at this point. I have followed some leads on here that in solved putting the IO80211Family.kext from 10.7.2 into the Systems/Library/Extensions folder and running next utility. Putting the same file into extra/Extensions again running kext utility. (I am running 10.7.3) I also tried grabbing the IO80211 kext from an MBP running 10.6.8 and putting that in both folders again with no improvement. Thoughts?

 

[minihack]

To be honest Spence network stuff can sometimes be a black art. It really shouldn't be, I know. I have had cards that work wonderfully in Windows and are supposed to have device IDs that will work in OSX and on one boot it'll tell me I have no hardware installed but on the next things will work......some of this stuff seems to defy logic.
If I were you I would start with the basics and, if you have a windows install, check and see if the card works under Windows. If you don't have windows then get a Linux ubuntu distro on a USB stick and check it works properly.
After that go back to Mac and see if it works in 32 bit mode (some seem to work under 32 but not 64).

 

[spence4]

photo.JPG

So here is what she looks like. I still have to put in the optical drive. I miscalculated when I gave the dimensions for brackets to my plastics guy here in HK, so I will probably just grind them down and use screws to hold it in place. I have had no luck with wifi, but I am perfectly content with a wired connection. Finally, I got my hands on another bluetooth board, but since I will be using a wired keyboard and mouse, I don't see why I would need to go through the hassle of splicing and soldering to a USB header. The big news on this build is that I have the proximity switch working perfectly. It is a pretty cool gimmick. Thanks to everyone for their help, particularly Neil and Minihack.

 

[minihack]

photo.JPG

So here is what she looks like. I still have to put in the optical drive. I miscalculated when I gave the dimensions for brackets to my plastics guy here in HK, so I will probably just grind them down and use screws to hold it in place. I have had no luck with wifi, but I am perfectly content with a wired connection. Finally, I got my hands on another bluetooth board, but since I will be using a wired keyboard and mouse, I don't see why I would need to go through the hassle of splicing and soldering to a USB header. The big news on this build is that I have the proximity switch working perfectly. It is a pretty cool gimmick. Thanks to everyone for their help, particularly Neil and Minihack.

Glad you got it sorted Spence. Yep, those plastics.......always helps if the guy cutting it has the parts in their hands to make sure it all fits up. Having personally sat down now with 4 different varieties of G4 models (and counting), a ruler, coreldraw and a laser machine I know that there is a learning curve to making sure these things fit!