Long time project done and as good as I can get it! Hackintosh with minimal modifications to a Power Mac G5 case. Fully working with 3D acceleration, Sound and quiet fans! Its older hardware but matches mid range Mac Pro specs.
Specs:
- Dual Xeon X5460 3.16 GHz Quad Core CPUs
- 24 GB DDR2 667Mhz ECC Registered Ram
- AMD Radeon HD6870 1GB vram
- Supermicro X7DCA-L uATX Dual 771 s5100 motherboard
- Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS
- 320 GB SATA2 System drive (planning on adding a 1 TB drive)
- 600w PSU (rewired original Power Mac G5 PSU into an ATX PSU)
So I've always thought Power Mac G5s and Mac Pros looked great. I just couldn't justify the costs that Apple charged for them (like 200% more than a normal PC). When Apple switched their hardware to common PC hardware it also meant that their OS would run on normal computers, with some finagling. So I started tinkered with the processing of getting OSX on PC hardware for 10 years.
RecentIy ran across cheap Power Mac computers and thought "why don't I just build one?" so a little more research and trying to build one close to the original stuff and found that older 771 Xeons were dirt cheap and a miracle motherboard that fit 2 of those CPUs and non FBDIMMs in a micro ATX package! The rest of the hardware I had laying around.
So I did modify the case a bit to fit the new motherboard, this included removing the old motherboard mounts and putting new ones in with epoxy. Cutting out part of the rear to accommodate the motherboard's ATX I/O footprint. Rewiring the 600w PSU to work with normal motherboards and support normal graphics cards up to 225w. Rewired the front panel cluster so the power button, power LED and USB port work, but the audio and firewire don't(not that important to me). Lastly swapped out the fans (Apple uses a wired voltage signal to control fans, not normal PWM) with regular PC fans.
Installing OSX was kinda hard, to install it you need a Mac to create the installer. Well that's a problem as I don't have a mac. The other option was to buy the OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard installation disc and run a custom bootloader to "bootstrap" the installer's os into booting. There are tweaks that had to be made for it to work, but once it booted up i could install it just fine. Once OSX was installed I had to permanently apply the bootloader and custom drivers to get full functionality out of the hackintosh. Then I had to upgrade OSX to 10.9 Mavericks to run certain programs (mostly games) and that is almost restarting the whole process over again.
So if anyone plans on doing a case mod hackintosh feel free to ask about what i did and didn't do and what i wished i did differently.
RecentIy ran across cheap Power Mac computers and thought "why don't I just build one?" so a little more research and trying to build one close to the original stuff and found that older 771 Xeons were dirt cheap and a miracle motherboard that fit 2 of those CPUs and non FBDIMMs in a micro ATX package! The rest of the hardware I had laying around.
So I did modify the case a bit to fit the new motherboard, this included removing the old motherboard mounts and putting new ones in with epoxy. Cutting out part of the rear to accommodate the motherboard's ATX I/O footprint. Rewiring the 600w PSU to work with normal motherboards and support normal graphics cards up to 225w. Rewired the front panel cluster so the power button, power LED and USB port work, but the audio and firewire don't(not that important to me). Lastly swapped out the fans (Apple uses a wired voltage signal to control fans, not normal PWM) with regular PC fans.
Installing OSX was kinda hard, to install it you need a Mac to create the installer. Well that's a problem as I don't have a mac. The other option was to buy the OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard installation disc and run a custom bootloader to "bootstrap" the installer's os into booting. There are tweaks that had to be made for it to work, but once it booted up i could install it just fine. Once OSX was installed I had to permanently apply the bootloader and custom drivers to get full functionality out of the hackintosh. Then I had to upgrade OSX to 10.9 Mavericks to run certain programs (mostly games) and that is almost restarting the whole process over again.
So if anyone plans on doing a case mod hackintosh feel free to ask about what i did and didn't do and what i wished i did differently.
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