[Success] Modded Powermac G4 with Haswell Xeon.

[ChildOfBodom]

ChildOfBodom's Haswell mATX:
GA-Z87MX-D3H - Xeon E3-1275V3 - GTX650

Components

Gigabyte GA-Z87MX-D3H Motherboard with DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and D-Sub Connections
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128601

Intel Xeon E3-1275 V3 Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116908

Modded PowerMac G4 Case

CORSAIR VS350 Power Supply

Crucial 8GB DDR3 1333MHz Memory (Overclocked to 1600MHz)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148465

Crucial M500 120GB SSD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148693

Seagate ST1000DM003 1TB HDD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840


Comments

Since a 'normal' Mac never appealed to me because of the price tag they put on mid range hardware I was looking for an alternative. Then I found this sweet website and was like "Hey, let's give this a shot and make it a case mod as side project."

So as soon as I got the idea I bought an old PowerMac G4 for €25,- and started cutting and painting.

After this was done I started saving up for some hardware to be fitted inside and since I already had a 1150 Xeon laying around this board was an easy choice.

After a while I ordered all the parts and started to check if everything fitted, which of course they didn't. So I had to cut a piece out of the drive bay braces and totally cut out the 3.5" floppy bay to get the 24 pin through.

After all of this was done and I had tested the hardware with a clean Windows 7 install I started with obtaining the software I'd need for getting this to work. So, I went across the street, since some millionaire architect lives there, and I assumed he had a Mac (which he ironically did), and I downloaded OS X Mavericks from the store together with MultiBeast and UniBeast.

When I got home around midnight I went straight through the installation process.

Once I had everything up and running, I pulled out the USB drive and tried to boot off of the internal SSD, which unfortunately gave me the boot error.

I managed to fix this by looking up this problem and booting from the USB once more to fill in a command in the Terminal after unmounting the boot SSD.

After this process I restarted and it booted normally from the SSD without any problem.

And as of now, everything still works just fine!

 

[eelhead]

Love it!
Looks nice and evil lol

 

[ChildOfBodom]

Love it!
Looks nice and evil lol

Hehe that was the point!

 

[oigarrison]

Nice work!! Would love to see how that Xeon scores in geekbench!

 

[rad-we]

Hi, nice work!
I have one or two of those cases and I am interested in knowing more about the internal modding and about the final noise.
Would you please explain the steps you performed and post some pictures of the insides? thanks.

 

[ChildOfBodom]

Hi, nice work!
I have one or two of those cases and I am interested in knowing more about the internal modding and about the final noise.
Would you please explain the steps you performed and post some pictures of the insides? thanks.

Basically, the optical drive bay comes right out the front with 2 screws. Cut off the WHOLE 3,5" floppy part and put the optical bay back in place, other than that take off the back I/O plate, drill out the standoffs since they're stuck in there and then drill new holes for normal M-ATX boards. I didn't want to make custom holes in my PSU so I just used double sided tape and tiewraps to keep it in place.

And for the lock mechanism, take the spring in the top and invert the grabbing point so it will lock itself instead of needing a padlock. Then you can use the pad lock ring in the back as a button to open the case up without using the handle on the side.

And for the power button and LED, you can take out the module in the front, screw out the pcb, and put a regular PC switch in there with double sided tape or glue. Same goes for the LED, it will fit and work just fine.

Link to build log

 

[Stork]

Please, no case mod questions/answers in this thread which is about the component selection, installation and system use.

ChildOfBodom, we encourage you to open a thread in The Workshop > Case Mods > PowerMac G4 forum section to describe your case mod. Upon you doing so, I will move the above case mod question posts to that thread.

 

[ChildOfBodom]

Please, no case mod questions/answers in this thread which is about the component selection, installation and system use.

ChildOfBodom, we encourage you to open a thread in The Workshop > Case Mods > PowerMac G4 forum section to describe your case mod. Upon you doing so, I will move the above case mod question posts to that thread.

It's fine, I put a link to my build log in the answer anyway. That's not a problem, is it?

 

[Stork]

It's fine, I put a link to my build log in the answer anyway. That's not a problem, is it?

Not a problem, but you'll get the users who hang out in the tonymacx86 Case Mods forum section, too. And you'll get some suggestions on how to improve your efforts, too, by some of our super case modders. So, no harm in replicating your blog post case mod description in a thread here. If you do so, you won't be the only one.

 

[eelhead]

It's fine, I put a link to my build log in the answer anyway. That's not a problem, is it?

Nope not an issue, other people do the same as well. That is another great forum for modding as well, lot of sweet builds there.

Thanks for sharing your build here