Mac Mod: Project MacBane - Converting my PowerMac G4 to Core i7

ehMax

That. Is. Sweet!!!!

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Mckitrick

Very cool! Can't wait to see it all closed up. What did you use to paint it black? Don't say Rolling Stones.. :P

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Photograph

Thanks everyone

The case went through a little prep work before it was painted:

• I finished cutting and drilling all holes before painting
• All sharp edges and metal burrs were removed
• All old tape and stickers were removed
• The whole case was scrubbed down with steel wool
• Cleaned with TSP (Trisodium Phosphate) and rinsed, then dried
• Then the case was painted with Tremclad primer for zinc coated steel, other wise the paint would easily flake off the cases zinc plating
• And then it was painted with three coats of flat black Tremclad rust paint with a little sanding between coats

I built this machine to last, and so far I am falling in love with it all over again

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One more thing, if you were interested in the whole process I kept a work log that details everything step by step over at Mac Life:

Macbane Worklog at Mac Life

And here's a link to the Flickr set if you don't feel like a lot of reading:

MacBane Flicker Album

Cheers everyone

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The 5770's have finally arrived so I can get back to work on this, all I am missing now are two 24" SATA cables to reach the RAID array up in the top of the case. And yes, the cooler on these cards looks a lot like the 1989 Batmobile.









And they actually fit!


And with enough parts to keep moving ahead I have started wiring the case:



Had to cut the top LED strip down by a centimeter to fit properly:



And Back panel wiring has started too:

pcronin

Awesome.

I assume you're going to run some kind of hackintosh os on that

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iMac aluminum 20" 2.4GHz (mostly painted)
HP Media Tablet (tx2517ca)
MacBook pro 17" (work machine)
Acer x223w 22"
ProTools M-Powered
M-Audio MobilePre USB, ProFire 2626
8 GB iPad mini 2nd gen(lost, mourning)
Nokia N97, N800
mini core solo, 1.25GB RAM, 100GB, Superdrive (my folks)

http://patthetech.blogspot.com

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Actually this is how I am hiding my gaming PC amongst my Macs, so there will be no OS tinkering here. It will run a 64 bit copy of Windows 7 as that is what will work best for gaming, I may skin it to look like OS X to throw people for a loop when they see an old G4 running Crysis in HD

pcronin

Beauty

I was pondering buying an old Mac tower to hide a win7 gamer in too. Very nice concept

__________________
iMac aluminum 20" 2.4GHz (mostly painted)
HP Media Tablet (tx2517ca)
MacBook pro 17" (work machine)
Acer x223w 22"
ProTools M-Powered
M-Audio MobilePre USB, ProFire 2626
8 GB iPad mini 2nd gen(lost, mourning)
Nokia N97, N800
mini core solo, 1.25GB RAM, 100GB, Superdrive (my folks)

http://patthetech.blogspot.com

Photograph

And here is the final result of my first case mod and three months worth of hard work:



















I will take some real photos sometime by the weekend and post them, thanks for looking

IllusionX

impressive..

only if i could find an old case.. hehe

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Mac Mini 1.1 - Core 2 Duo 1.83ghz, 2gb ram, 320gb HD - rockin;
Macbook 3.1 - 2.2ghz, 4gb ram, 320gb HD - Sold