Case Mod - In Progress Graphite 5 (Apple G5 mod) |22.05.2013 - Last update with the Final Pictures

Great job. Looks nice.

 

Thank you guys! Sorry for the lack of updates, I was busy for a while with my final exams, but I was success and after 5 years of learning I become an architect Now I'm searching for jobs and start to work on my G5 case again. I'll show you some great news soon

 

CONGRATULATIONS!

 

01.02.2013 - The Sponsors are coming!

So, there is the some great news about the case! The Nvidia is support my work!​

I've got a Geforce GTX 650 Ti videocard from them!
Thank you Nvidia and also thank you Ramiris Europe Kft for sending me this great card!















If you are think that is the full story, you are wrong! I've got another package of goodies!
PC Gear, one of the biggest hardware store in Hungary sent me a beautiful XigmateK Dark Knight - Night Hawk Edition CPU cooler!











Thank you Pc Gear!

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Its great to see,what great pieces of HW you going to fitt in case
I m sure this going to be really nice,when you finish

 

You lucky friggen duck! just wish gramps'd let me at the rig. He's uncomfirtable about hving liquid in it so im stuck between a rock and a hard place. I can only afford upgrading and the old fart isn't gonna let that happen.

 

I am glad your back. Its seems there is about 4 Mac mods right now and all them are taking really cool paths. Must be the year of the Mac mods.

 

Great news nagyizom! Congrats for the sponsors!

 

Cheers Guys! Now I need your help! Is there anybody who knows, how I can fix properly the DVD drive into the G5 case? I forgot to take some photos about the disassembly and I don't remember what was the steps....

 

Looking at the photos in the OP looks like it is fixed to the now removed midplate at the top of the case. Also check out the http://www.powerbookmedic.com guides on how to remove the drive under the Power Mac G5 Guides.

 

Thanks Yukionno, these are very useful videos....I wonder how I haven't known them before.

 

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From those who has followed my blog. I have to apologize because of this long break.
After the previous article all the component has arrived from the sponsors.
On the 8 of February the courier has arrived to me with 2 big boxes of components.

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In one of the boxes was a Cooler Master GX520w PSU from the CM.

Thank you Cooler Master!

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The second box has arrived from the Austrian company Noctua. I use the Noctua fans for long years and I am very satisfied with their products, this why I have contacted them if they can provied me some of their items. They were very gentle to send me 2 NF-S12B and 2 NF-A6x25 FLX fans. The first two will provide cooling for the case , the 6 cm fans will cool the PSU.

Noctua, thank you!

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The 3rd package has arrived from a Hungarian pc component shop , the PCX.hu.

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They provided me an Asrock FM2A75 Pro mainboard. Great!

Thanks yor the sponsorship PCX!

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In the last days has arrived the package from the last sponsor. This time it has come from England, from the headquarter of Kingston Technology. The careful packaging has contained two sets (16gb ) Kingston DDR3 Hyperx 10th anniversary memory, witch will be more then enough for me. In an other package has arrived a 120Gb SSD also from the HyperX3k series.

Thank you Kingston Technology!





I want to say Thank You for all the sponsors from here too.
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I did a picture with all the sponsored components on it. When I have started searching for sponsors I never imagined to win so many supporter for this project I am very happy to see this outcome.

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Only one thing was needed from here to complete the machine. I needed a CPU. This one I have bought from a shop.
I have chosen a Athlon II X4 -750k CPU, I think this is perfect in this configuration.

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So the list of components:

Mainboard: Asrock FM2A75-Pro4-M

CPU: AMD Athlon !! X4-750K @3,4 GHz + Xigmatek Dark Knight Night Hawk Edition

GPU: Nvidia Geforce GTX 650 Ti

Memory: Kingston HyperX 10th Edition 4+4 GB DDR3 - 1600MHz CL9

SSD+HDD: Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SSD + Samsung 320 GB 7200 rpm HDD

PSU: Cooler Master GX 550 Bronze

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In August I have started to shape an inner cover plate.This has two main reason.
The first is that the case almost no cable management. I did not wanted the cable to go in chaos in the inner section, this why I have decided to make these cover plates.
The other reason , witch was a problem at the mainboard too, that the usual fixing points are missing from this case. They are needed to fix the drives , fan controls , fans .... etc.
So I decided to solve the two problems in one step, they will work as covering plates and they will hold the consoles for the components to be buld in.
In the beginning I planned to create 3 plates. One horizontal to the mainboard, on this one I wanted to fix the fan controller and maybe the SSD. One other behind the front panel to fix the fans.
The third one was to do as the bottom plate to cover the PSU cables and to hold the Himuro with the HDD.

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Fortunately the CM PSU is fits to the G5’s original PSU box so it can go back to it's place and I can use the original cover plate too. With this I will get closer to my goal to use as many original components as I can during the rebuild.

After the making of the cover plates I have to mention one more thing. Thanks to one of my good friend the case has a new front panel, witch is special because the original functions works on the PC too!(Meaning the power button, FireWire,USB). This has been upgraded from USB 2.0 to 3.0. Thank you very much Bari!

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On the remaining parts I had to do some more modding to be usable on my later work.
The first mod was the place of the turn on panel.
The plexi was in the way so I have to cut it out and now the covering parts can be put to place.

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The other task is with the board. The board wich was used as a model is not as wide as the final Asrock board so I have to cut a piece from the cover plate again to fit the board to it’s place.

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Finally I had to do an ear with I can fix the plate behind the front panel to the horizontal plate to avoid its side swing.

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The unnecessary drilled holes will be covered with some kind of stickers so they wont worsen the final look.

The next task was to fix in the Himuro to the case.
I have thought about it very much. I had 2 plans. First I wanted to turn it on the side and wanted to fix it on the Psu’s cover plate. The second plan was to fix on the vertical plate ,parallel with the mainboard.
The best choice was the 2nd plan.
I wanted to make a frame for the fixing witch I can move in and out from the case without taking out the Himuro from it and without taking apart the whole case again.
For this I had to ask for help again, because I don't have any tool to bend metal.
My friend could do it for me in no time, so I could moved on with the work.

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I made 4 ears than I have drilled the holes for the rubber bands. At the probe everything was at place, so I made the 6 drill to fix the frame. First I merged the place on the plexi, after it I strengthened together the 2 pieces.

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At this point I made one mistake, the screw’s head was too large so if the Himuro is on it's place I can not screw out the frame.

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Fortunately with the change of the mounting sequence I could fix it.
The pictures are shows the right sequence:

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Thats all for now. I hope you like it!

 

Nice gear you have there! I really like the Xigmatek cpu cooler. Nice build!

 

Ohhh man this is awesome,can t wait to see finish!
I really like your work,and the previous mod too!
(Lenyugozo a munkad,nagyon tetszik)

 

I like how you have made a plate before the mobo. There is so much usable space there for hard drives and happy to see you are using it. Good job on landing the sponsors. Its going to be a wicked case.

 

Oh well, it's been a long time since I update this thread...sorry about that.
Hukkel, Zsolt a Marquee: Thank you Guys! The next update will come on the following days.

 

15.04.2013 Working on the PSU

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Hello Guys!
There was a lot of little things that I had to work out on the case, but I got a job (finally!) and I didn't get enough time for it, just at the weekends and in the evenings.

First, I "carbonized" my cover plates:

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I've made some mistakes, but after the photo I solved them with the heatgun.

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The next step was to customize my PSU. As you can remember, I've planned to mount the Cooler Master PSU's PCB into the Mac's original PSU case. I proudly says, It's working
I made some standoffs to mount the PCB into the case:

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I glued them into the house. As you can see, the distance between the cover and heatsink is just about 2millimetrs:

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After that I started to customized the power supply' cables. The original state:

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Cut the cables to the proper size:

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Finished product:

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After that I made some modifications on the PSU' cover plate. First I cut out this ugly bump, and the holes for the cables both on the PSU house and the cover plate:

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This was very simple idea, so I decided to make 3 plexi squares to hold the cables in position.

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To remove the cover plate easily I have to expand the holses:

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This is how it looks right now:

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The last thing that I' ve made is an extension cord betveen the PSU and the original Mac's socket.

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"Yeah, it's made in Ghetto style" you might say but it works perfectly

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After That I put my rig together temporary:

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Try to put the plexi plate into position....

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....and it didn't work. Something is wrong! Grrr

The VGA's power cable is the culprit, I have to fix it:

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Thats for now, thanks for watching!

 

Nice sponsor package.

Good luck with your build!

 

2013.05.22 - Last update with the final pictures

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Hello Everyone!

Finally I have got a few moments, so I can update the blog. In this scenario I show you the final movements of the Graphite5 modding.
Last time I have finished the update at the point when I have put together the machine to do some testing. After the subscribing of the errors and thoughts, I disassembled it, and next day I started to paint the remaining parts of the frame and the smaller parts.
It was a great weather outside, ideal conditions to work on. I prepared the surfaces, the roughening and the masking of the plates. On places where I found damage on the surface, I repaired them with fiber repair kit before putting on the primer. After the 2 primer layer has dried I used the Maestro paint again and It was perfect again, I got a beautiful homogene surface. The parts received 3 layers of painting , between the layers I left them dry for 10-15 minutes, it was enough time in the sunshine to be touchable.

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After 1 day drying I stared to put the case together. I covered the critical parts with masking tapes to prevent problems. Unfortunately at 2 or 3 points I scratched the painting but I repaired them with brush. This small mistake did not spoiled my mood, because with the assembling the case was ready for use!

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At the same time the sleeves has arrived. On the package a small drawing, yes this is Nil’s work, I will use MDPC sleeving.

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I ordered the package with my two friends. I planned triple colour sleeves in the case, and because the Noctua fans has off white and brown colours the sleeving will be white-brown and titan grey.

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Instead of using the traditional shrink tube method I wished to use the sand shrink way.
Nils was kind to send some plus sleeves to practice .

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After I could use the technique properly I started to sleeve the cables. I tried to figure out the model the way use the sleeves at the same amount.
The sleeved filaments first I had to drill through a plexi part, and after it I could put the spikes back to the connector, ensuring that all the spikes go back to their original place.
Tha display cards connector was mentioned in a previous entire, because of it I could not put to place the original plexi cover plate. I figured out to cut out a smaller pieces of the connector case , so the cable could be bend in a smaller radius.After making the move this worked out as I expected, the sleeved cables could be bended back in better way, but at the final assemble came out that tech connector case is still not letting the plate to its place ,so I had to pack it and take it away because I could not use it.

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The Optical drives front plate had to be modified a bit too.In the original G5 case drive’s plate was fixed with a double sided sticker on a plastik plate, which after the aesthetic look was used to open the cover door.
This plate I removed from its place , the unnecessary glue I removed too with heating up and with diluent, and with a two sided sticker I fixed my optical drive.

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The PSU cable sleeving was finished in 2 days afternoon, after it I concentrated on the lights of the case. Because the case do not have any side window or „roof” window, I did not plan a big light inside, you can not look into the case unless I remove the side plate.
I had some led lights left from my previous projekt which I could use at the G5 too. I did the circuit from the previously purchased black colored 2 wire cable, which can be switched on with a switch on the back. Its get power from directly from the PSU.

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The first „final” assemblement was taken place on Wednesday's midnight. In two hours the case was out together. I made two pictures at night, the first one shows my work corner during the assemblement, the other is a quick picture of the work.

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After the work done the power on was the next step but it is delayed a bit because unfortunately a wire was broken in the front panel, so the machine did not started. Quickly I put an other switch on the mainboard , with it I could started the machine, but the HDD did not whispered nothing.
After a quick dismantling I put together the machine on the table with shaking hands. I hoped that my storage drive did not died. With a huge luck the drive was ok. Maybe I just connected the sata cable in the wrong way .
Thursday morning I started gain to put together the machine, 3 times checking everything not to case any trouble again. The front panel I repaired the wiring and started to hope that everything will be all right this time.

And not.

Turn on doesn't work again.

Relax – told myself- you triple checked everything , start with the other switch on the board, if it still not work you can start worrying.

Fortunately with that everything worked great, system started and the machine was ok. The panel witch was made by Bari for me never been tested before so the error could not be occurred.So for now I have to use the backup switch, but finally I have finished the project.

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Thursday afternoon I brought the G5 to my photographer friend’s studio to make some picture of it.

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On the 27th of April with my girlfriend and with the finished case we departed to be a part of the Veletech2013 modding competition, which is Hungary's biggest modder event and which is organized by the Prohardver.

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I had a great time there, I enjoyed all to moments. A lot of people was curious to see the G5, and I have spoked with a lot of visitors. It was great to meet , to see and to meet again with the other modders, with the most of them I can only meet one time in a year. There was a lot of nice modded projects, and builded cases to see by the public on this Sunday , and I think all of us can be prod of ourselves.

Now I finishing this enrty , the modding of the case – not to mention some minor repair work – is finished. This was a little bit long work, but from the September of 2012 to the January of 2013 I had to learn and to pritect my degree. An old dreem had come true , I always wanted to have an Apple G5 case witch have a PC inside.
At this moment I wish to thank all the supporters who has supported the building this machine:

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So this is the end. Thanks to you to read this worklog, I hope you enjoy it!

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Great work my friend! Excellent G5 project