It’s not often that you find a Macintosh dumped out on the side of the road. [GrandpaSquarepants] was one of the lucky individuals that did. Being the good friend that he is, he made his roomy carry the 50 lb behemoth back to their apartment. Not surprisingly, the machine didn’t boot up and ended up sitting around the apartment for a few years.
Fast forward from 2012 to present day and [G.S.] decided it was time to do something with that G5. That “something” wasn’t about fixing it. Instead, it was gutted to turn it into a Macintosh-cased Hackintosh. If you’re unfamiliar with Hackintosh, it’s a term used to describe a project that gets Mac OS to run on non-Apple hardware.
[G.S.] could have just crammed everything into the G5 case and called it a day but he decided to spend the time to make it look supremely presentable. The case was significantly modified to fit the non-Apple computer components, including the addition of a custom rear panel made from aluminum to mount the power supply, cooling fan and to allow access to the motherboard connectors. Take a close look; there are two CPU coolers in there. It was such a close fit that there is only 2.6mm (.1 inch) of clearance between the cooler and the case.
Two Dell U2415 monitors and an Apple wireless keyboard and mouse make up the rest of the setup. Overall, [G.S.] is happy with the final outcome of his project, well… except for the Apple mouse. He says that has got to go!
[via reddit]
Wow, a case modding, such hacking.
stop crying…
Much case. Such hack. Wow!
Much better.
Can you do better?
I’m sure your wizardly brother could.
Actually it’s just one big CPU cooler, a Noctua NH-D14 or similar. Very large dual-fan, dual-radiator units, but they are mighty quiet, which was probably important for emulating the original.
I was going to post this same thing but you beat me to it lol.
I have an old G4 I wanted to do something with and thought this article might have something useful in it.
Nope, simple well documented case mod putting an intel motherboard in an admittedly nice G5 case.
Looking for a Mac, left wondering “where’s the beef?”
There’s one thing nice about mac. They have nice cases. Keep making nice cases, Apple!
Apart from the terrible ‘bin’ Mac Pro.
that is their selling point actually.
The case is nice, but those ‘handles’ on top and bottom look ugly as fuck and render the case completely unsuitable for rack mount and add unnecessary height when placing the computer under a desk
Yeah, but they make them nice and easy to pick up and throw
Very nicely done
I didn’t know anyone was making adapter plates to convert it into an ATX case.
Have a look at the Magic Mouse, although it does need taming out of the box. I have made some people happy in the office by informing them of http://magicprefs.com/ which allows you do fiddle with the touch areas for middle click, etc.
What makes it smell like a Mac? Does it use money as thermal paste?
Kudos to dude for building a computer.
Well it is a nice case, maybe he should have made a mini-kegerator, now THAT would have been a hack!
Understandable, but also disappointing that the multi-zone thermal design wasn’t preserved or emulated.
THose rubber band mounts for the fans are going to fail pretty quickly.
Meanwhile a Macbook pro can be seen sitting off to the right in the image. Wouldn’t it have been logical to just use that instead? Investing all that cash and the case modding, just to be able to run the current iteration of OS X, seems a bit counterintuitive. I can attest to the ‘because I can,’ argument, but usually it’s out of necessity or realistic desire. In this case, there are no guarantees of development support for future releases. Many people build a hackintosh because an actual current apple computer is pricey. If you already own official apple swag, why waste the money on a rig thats built out to currently supported hackintosh kexts? Is iPhoto really that important to you?
i have four g5 tower at home just for this (and make a table with 2).