OK, so I've finally come to ask for help. I've done one Hackintosh, but it hasn't been stable enough for me.
So I want to do another concentrating on "beauty" and "serenity." That means stability. I have two g5 PowerMacs that I bought over the last few years and they have developed the dread "Capacitor Problem." It will cost umpty-umph dollars to replace the motherboard and when done it will just be a matter of time before it fails again. Enough about that. Last night I got trapped here and spent the most enjoyable evening reading about inserting quad-core motherboards in the MacPro cases. This morning I called
http://www.mountainmods.com/mountain-mo ... -p-56.html and ordered the first motherboard tray and fan guards for the back of the case.
Yeah, I got a g5 that had that. Total pain, thought I'd got a perfectly working g5...but no.
So now I have a few questions.
1) should I rush to buy the Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H board on this the last day it is on sale? It has bad reviews and great reviews but there is supposed to be an identical Intel version. What is that all about? Well, my confusion about the mixed reviews and the fact that Amazon had about seven "used" boards for at least twenty dollars cheaper than the sale price makes me believe the poor reviews so I skipped this one.
Read the User Builds Thread. Shows you all the combinations of motherboards and cpu ect that users have got working and how they got it working. Obviously search for the motherboard you want.
2) From eelhead's G5 mod
eelhead's G5 Mod said:
So while I was in the middle of making mine I was offered a chance to test one for Gus on here. He started to sell them for a stint but has stopped I do believe. Which sucks because the cable is awesome quality!! I can’t speak highly enough for Gus’ workmanship and if he starts selling them again and I hear I will let everybody know!!
I could sure use two sets of these cables. Is there any chance?
Unfortunately I stopped making them. There are two people on IM who make them. But they charge far to much and it's sooo easy. I'm sure you could manage it just fine. Just ask and everyone will be happy to chip in.
3) Everybody seems to be jumping through huge hoops to replace the Apple power supply with a PC version. Is that because the Apple Power Supply doesn't put out enough Wattage? Because it would sure be a lot easier to merely wire up an adapter cable than what some of these mods do. Or even just attaching an external cable to
http://www.amazon.com/500W-Magnum-LCD-M ... r-mr-title I'm pretty sure that I've seen 500 Watt units for sale and that seems to be what people are doing all the serious stuff to obtain.
I put my PSU inside the apple PSU housing. Just makes for a neater mod(IMO) but you could mount it on the top tray where the HDDs are at present.
There is no way to wire the original G5 PSU into ATX standards. If it is a powerful G5 PSU I would suggest selling it and buying a dead or lower wattage one.
4) I can understand the Elegance involved in using the Apple disc drive holders, but there seems to be a lot of activity in the various versions of
http://www.amazon.com/KingWin-Multi-Bay ... +drive+bay and it looks like it would be fairly trivial to hang that inside, and then you could put a bunch of disk space inside without having to wait for thunderbolt. And changing OSes would be trivial. (I'm kind of curious about that Mac-Ubuntu I read about last night.)
Personal preference. I liked the idea of reusing them. Some need lots of drives so add in a larger HDD rack.
5) This exercise is going to make me spin off a PC-Clone because I have to clean up a bunch of junk to find space to work.
I don;t understand. Do you mean just build a pc from all the parts you currently have?
6) I keep noodling around in my head about making a mini-mac cluster. Has anyone done that yet? It should be trivial. The problem is in finding someone with a few Mac-minis lying around. This getting old comes with no Job, no money, and no toys... Whatever you do, don't ever grow up. Because after you grow up comes growing old.