• Top Shelf Archives Hacked For Mac 2017

I am building myself a gaming rig and figured the best looking case out there is the power mac G5 tower. I bought an old broken G5 which unfortunately arrived with a little case damage just like my good G5. DPD and UPS are useless cowboys. Anyway I got a full refund and was let keep the case so I think I'll rivet it back again or something as subtle as possible.

I am willing to put in the extra effort as I know the amount of work that is involved. Wish me luck! Phase 1: Removal of internal parts and cleaning.

I never thought stripping a machine could be so difficult! This was the single most tedious exercise I have ever performed. Especially removing the processors with those enormousness air cooling heatsinks in the way. No guides for the air cooled one by the way! I had to fashion myself a super long screw driver just to get at those awkward Phillips screws hidden deep down in a little abyss between the heatsinks. Motherboard wasnt too bad to remove after that.

The top tray was very time consuming also. I am terrified I will lose the tiny tiny metal horseshoe for the latching mechanism. Have it stored in an old jewellery box! The back top handle is warped out of shape as seen. Hopefully I can deal with this later.

The first and hardest job was removing the big ass heatsinks and processors. (1-2 Hours between finding tools and figuring it out) Then the infamous top shelf needed removing.

(Almost another 2 hours before I could get the whole lot off!) All the internal parts, taking up my entire middle shelf! Finally got it totally emptied! I cleaned the case inside and out with wipes and polish. (I think it's former owners had kept it outdoors for some amount of time. There was weird dirt on it.). Click to expand.I'm sure it is. Will be very satisfied when I'm done I'm going to put in: i5 4670K (Haswell ) Intel Z87 Motheboard (Full ATX) 8GB Corsair Ram VTX Radeon HD 7870 2GB 500GB HDD + 64GB SSD I havent ordered any parts yet, but I'd prefer to have full ATX for upgrade purposes anyway so I don't mind too much about the extra effort.

I don't suppose you know any shortcut to requiring the power button and fans? Maybe some little converter you can buy or something? It's a lot of work! Click to expand.I used BlackCH's cable, it was 28.5 euros delivered from spain, it came pretty quick too. I posted the link in my g5 mod thread but here is a derect link to his website: Just send him an email, his communication is excellent.

He makes quite a few a week and updates his website daily with tracking numbers and eta's. I replaced the fans with zalman ones, you can convert the originals, but it's a lot of work. To do it properly you have to open up the fans and replace the motor and control board with ones from inside a regular pc fan. I think if you plug the G5 ones directly onto a motherboard they go at full whack like the G5's 'panic mode'!

I used BlackCH's cable, it was 28.5 euros delivered from spain, it came pretty quick too. I posted the link in my g5 mod thread but here is a derect link to his website: Just send him an email, his communication is excellent.

He makes quite a few a week and updates his website daily with tracking numbers and eta's. I replaced the fans with zalman ones, you can convert the originals, but it's a lot of work. To do it properly you have to open up the fans and replace the motor and control board with ones from inside a regular pc fan. I think if you plug the G5 ones directly onto a motherboard they go at full whack like the G5's 'panic mode'!

Just in the middle of a Mac Pro mod at the moment so I thought I would share. A quick word about motherboards. I had specific requirements when it came to a motherboard for this build. Unlike my first Apple Mac case mod, a power Mac G5 the Mac Pro has the four hot swap drive bays which I wanted to retain, this meant that I could not cut the double skin top shelf of the Mac Pro to allow a full size ATX motherboard to pass behind as there is not enough space behind the hot swap assembly so I had to opt for a mATX board.

This board had to have two things to meet my requirements, 5.1 sound from the rear (with 3.5mm jacks) and a PCIe x1 slot for the Apple WiFi/BT4 card. On a lot of motherboards the PCIe x1 slot is not available if a dual slot graphics card is used but I did find a board which met my criteria and that was the MSI Z97M Gaming. I have also never liked the idea of trying to shoehorn a regular ATX power supply into a Mac case so like my G5 mod I gutted the Mac Pro PSU and installed the circuit board from a Corsair CX600 into the now empty Mac PSU. This has the advantage of not having to mod the rear of the case as it re-uses the mains input socket. It is also a well designed enclosure having good ventilation and an external cooling fan which allows for straight-through ventilation, I just swapped the Apple fan for an ultra quiet 120mm Noctua.

Here are some photos: You have to make sure that the cables exit as close to the back of the PSU as possible as space is tight and the cables have to pass behind the fan at the rear of the case. Here it is installed. If you keep the cables tidy as can be seen they easily fit in the space behind the optical drive bay when it is installed. Just a couple of points to note, the hole in the top tray where the cables pass through is not very big so be gentle when threading the cables through. Secondly because of the cable path through the case I found that the cables that supply power to the eight pin CPU connection and the graphics card were not long enough and I had to get extensions as will be seen in some upcoming photos.

Here is the case with the modified PSU and optical drive bay installed. More to follow. I had left a few old motherboard stand-off's on the left side of the case so I decided to mount a couple of pieces of 5mm clear acrylic over these stand-off's, this would serve to keep most of the cabling in the case tidy and gave me a mounting surface for the SDS - SATA adaptor, so it was out with the faulty motherboard and time to install some new parts. The board was mounted to four 3.5mm threaded holes in the acrylic. More shots of the case with the components going in. The front fan unit installed with the Apple fans replaced by two Noctua 120mm. This unit obscures most of the cabling for a neater look.

Handhelds charge while docked. Easymaccopy for mac. The first is the, a stereo speaker system for iPods and iPhones that offers a choice of vertical or horizontal docking. The is a full-channel FM transmitter for iPods and iPhones that includes a remote control.

Now on with the old Apple CPU heatsink cover. Just got to work on fitting the old Apple memory riser board surround/cover around the radiator and it's associated pipework and then it will be almost finished.

I've just got to wait for the SAS cable to arrive to complete the job, so more to come with fitting that and installing the OS. More to follow. Click to expand.

1: Yes a little conversion is required, this is the end of the drive bays wiring loom. These two connections serve all four drive bays: The data plug is an SAS type, this needs to be converted to four SATA connections that then plug into the new motherboards SATA headers. The power socket needs rewiring (the eight pin power plug seen above serves the four drives in two pairs) I cut of this plug and replaced it with two Molex male plugs that each connect to two drives in parallel (a four pin Molex can be used because the Apple system does not need the Orange 3v connection to the drive) Some problems are being experienced with this conversion at the moment which can be followed here: 2: A standard ATX PSU won't fit inside the Apple PSU casing. The ATX PSU must be gutted and transferred to the Apple PSU enclosure.

I have more or less finished my build. Below are some more pictures. I'm having problems with the conversion of the four drive bay connections so this will be an ongoing challenge to find out why the drives are not being recognised.

If this can't be resolved the Apple drive bay wiring loom will be stripped out and the drives connected in the standard one data and one power connection per drive configuration. Even though the above seems to be the correct configuration HDD's and SSD's are not recognized (work in progress) So this is the final look of the build, the two separate cooling zones still work as Apple intended (with the side cover on of course) and work well to keep all components cool. Now time to remove all of the plastic protection film from the case!!

Top Shelf Archives Hacked For Mac 2017

I'll report back when the HDD connection problem has been resolved, in the meantime I will install the OS with the SSD connected in the conventional way.