FrankenMac Gaming Rig

[Kharmoth]

Well then folks. As the title suggests my goal lies in frankensteining a gaming rig into an old iMac 27" 2009/10/11 (the thicker one).

I found a working LVDS-connector on ebay to access the iMac's screen and cut a couple of holes into the iMac's back to fit my GPU and AIO water cooling.

It's not easy but I was able to cram in a full size ATX board (might buy a mini-ITX one soon-ish), GPU (GTX 960 via PCIE extension cord) and the water cooling as well as 2 hard drives and the LVDS connector boards. 

My problem right now that I don't seem to find a way of including the power supply  (it's way too big and I can't find anything that would). The maximum dimensions I have if I don't want to cut open the Back for another hole would be 10 x 10 x 3,5 cm. My current solution is having the PSU on the outside and running the needed cables in through the old power connection hole.

I also might've fucked around with my current PSU thus breaking my GPU so that setup might change sometime during the next 1 to 2 months (currently trying to decide between a vega 64 and rtx 2060)

 

My main interest would be if any of you have an idea adressing the power supply. Are there any tiny ones with enough wattage?

Also if I buy a mini-ITX motherboard which should I get? was thinking about MSI B450I and an AMD 2600x processor.

 

My current setup is/was:

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Intel Z170 So.1151 Dual Channel DDR4 ATX Retail

16GB (2x 8192MB) HyperX FURY schwarz Dual Rank DDR4-2133 DIMM CL14-14-14-33 Dual Kit

600 Watt Corsair CX Series CX600 Non-Modular 80+ Bronze

4GB Palit GeForce GTX 960 JetStream Aktiv PCIe 3.0 x16 2xDVI/1xHDMI 2.0/1xDisplayPort (Retail)

Intel Core i5 6600 4x 3.30GHz So.1151 TRAY

 

wasn't anything special but it did me a solid job until now and was enough for my purposes in gaming and according to the occulus tool everything except the 960 is fine for VR which I kinda wanna get into soon.

If I upgrade parts I'm mainly concerned that they're a solid choice supporting me for the next couple years like my old setup did. I don't need ultimate performance as long as it's affordable and keeps me company for a while.

[Crunchy Dragon]

What kind of size restrictions are you working with?

 

I'd imagine even an SFX would be a squeeze.

[Kharmoth]

@Crunchy Dragon

well basically everything is a squeeze in there so yeah sfx PSUs are too big.

The max height in there is 6 cm - 1.8 cm for the screen also that's the point where the mounting and swivel mechanism sits which is about 3 cm high.

Right now the remaining cm is taken by passing cables and part of the ATX mainboard. there probably isn't a way to put it inside. Even the small brick of my thinkpad would be difficult to fit. the only remaining space right now is in the bottom behind that bar. The space would be around 4 x 3 x 30 cm.

[Crunchy Dragon]

10 minutes ago, Kharmoth said:

@Crunchy Dragon

well basically everything is a squeeze in there so yeah sfx PSUs are too big.

The max height in there is 6 cm - 1.8 cm for the screen also that's the point where the mounting and swivel mechanism sits which is about 3 cm high.

Right now the remaining cm is taken by passing cables and part of the ATX mainboard. there probably isn't a way to put it inside. Even the small brick of my thinkpad would be difficult to fit. the only remaining space right now is in the bottom behind that bar. The space would be around 4 x 3 x 30 cm.

Yeah, you'd probably be better off trying to find some way to make it fit externally. I doubt even a 1U server unit would fit in there.

[Kharmoth]

4 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Yeah, you'd probably be better off trying to find some way to make it fit externally. I doubt even a 1U server unit would fit in there.

That might definetely be true and I'm working on a solution that would hide it right below the IMac inside my desk but I haven't heard of those server units yet so I'll check how much space those need.

[Crunchy Dragon]

3 minutes ago, Kharmoth said:

That might definetely be true and I'm working on a solution that would hide it right below the IMac inside my desk but I haven't heard of those server units yet so I'll check how much space those need.

Thinking about it again, I doubt even a server power supply would work, usually those don't have all the wires needed for a standard PC.

 

Usually they have contacts on the PSU that slot into the motherboard, which then disperses the power wherever it needs to go in the system.

[Kharmoth]

 

10 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Thinking about it again, I doubt even a server power supply would work, usually those don't have all the wires needed for a standard PC.

 

Usually they have contacts on the PSU that slot into the motherboard, which then disperses the power wherever it needs to go in the system.

ah I see okay that does sound difficult to work around. I guess I'll have to abandon the internal PSU then and fix it into my pc. but first I'll have to find some replacement parts and check which parts I fried and which are still fine. Thanks for your help though, greatly appreciated!