Apple Hack Pro [G5 Mod, Hackintosh, OSX, 2600K]

[paulsterio]

Apple Hack Pro [G5 Mod, Hackintosh, OSX, 2600K]

 

Hey Guys, 

 

So it's been a long time since I've put a build together and I have a vacation from now till the 4th of Jan 2016, so I thought I'd start a bit of a summer project (yes, I'm in Australia - it's summer here). This will be a Powermac G5 mod, with several key aims. Not only am I hoping to run OSX, but I'm also hoping to fit this all in a $500 budget and have it powerful enough to be my secondary workstation. 

 

This is also my first full-blown mod, so please be kind. Anyway, let's get down to it. 

 

Parts List

They won't be the most powerful components, but they will suit what I need well. The 2600K is a seriously powerful chip that overclocks excellently (many get 5GHz on it) and with HT, it still beats out the latest i5 6600K on heavily multi-threaded workloads (e.g. Cinebench). Some components I will be recycling, thus, the $0 designation. Yes, this is somewhat inspired by Scrapyard Wars and getting great performance per dollar. All of these components were sourced from Gumtree (the Australian equivalent of Craigslist).

• Powermac G5 Case [$70]
• Intel Core i7 2600K [$120]
• mATX Motherboard - Undecided [~$80]
• 32GB DDR3 RAM [$100] 
• Samsung 840 EVO 250GB [$0]
• Corsair RM550 PSU [$50]

I haven't decided on a GPU yet because I'm not familiar with OSX compatibility. I'm happy running it off the iGPU for now, but there's $80 left in the budget for a GPU. 32GB RAM is also more than I need, but I managed to snag it in a bundle with the CPU for a good price, so I'll probably end up selling half of that, keeping 16GB and hopefully I'll be able to budget out around $150 for the GPU. 

 

Table of Contents

This will hopefully be a 20 day project, as I have to be done by the 4th of January. Yes, the log will lag behind the days a little bit.

1. Day 1 - Scrapping the Powermac G5
2. Day 2 - Cutting the G5 and installing an ATX back and standoffs
3. Day 3 - Hardware Shopping and mounting PSU
4. Day 4 - Test-fitting with draft hardware and cutting the fan hole inserts
5. Day 5 - Modding the power button
6. Day 6 - Main hardware is here! 
7. Day 7 - Installing OSX and Why Sandy Bridge?
8. Day 8 - Testing the Corsair H105
9. Day 9 - Installing the Deepcool Maelstrom 120
10. Day 10 - Overclocking and Benchmarks

[Gofspar]

followerino, hyped for dis shit

[paulsterio]

Day 1 - Scrapping the Powermac G5

Checking in for Day 1, I actually didn't intend to log this build, so there's not that many pictures for the first day, but there will be more from now on, I promise. Here's a few before pictures of the Powermac G5. 

 

 

 

 

And after a few hours of scrapping, pulling, unscrewing, a few cuts and injuries, here we are!

 

 

Notice the bent and unremoved PCI slots, I couldn't remove them with the manual tools I had, so I won't be able to get it out until I pull out the power tools tomorrow. 

[paulsterio]

Day 2 - Cutting the G5 and installing an ATX back and standoffs

Checking in for the Day 2 (still catching up!), today I cut the back of the G5 and installed an ATX back which I cut from an old case. I measured out the height with a draft motherboard so that I got the height right for the I/O shield and PCI slots. It is held in place by screws, glue, zip ties and the lot. It's rock solid and doesn't move at all, so I'm a happy camper. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stay tuned for tomorrow guys!

[Heesleemer]

Love hackintoshes and macro/G5 mods followed

[Sithhy]

Oh damn, can't wait to see it finished & working in all it's glory [emoji1]

Also little Offtopic:

Do you have ANY snow in Australia? [emoji4]

[Heesleemer]

Also how long did it take you to take appart that g5? i had the same model and WOW it took forever, had to buy some extensions for my screw driver too mid way through

[paulsterio]

Oh damn, can't wait to see it finished & working in all it's glory [emoji1]

Also little Offtopic:

Do you have ANY snow in Australia? [emoji4]

 

Thanks!

 

In terms of snow, not really in the main cities (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane...etc.), but if you're willing to travel a little bit into the Alpine regions then there tends to be snow during the winter months, e.g. Mt Buller or Mt Hotham are the closest ones to me in Melbourne (around 3 hours away by car). 

 

 

Also how long did it take you to take appart that g5? i had the same model and WOW it took forever, had to buy some extensions for my screw driver too mid way through

 

It took me around 2 hours. That said, I didn't do it properly by any means. I guess it'd take a lot longer if you actually took it apart properly. I had no intention of putting it back together, so certain things I just ripped out rather than unscrewed, such as the CPU heatsinks, which I just tore out after taking out half the screws (because I had nothing to get into the other screws with). 

[paulsterio]

Day 3 - Hardware Shopping and mounting PSU

Didn't manage to get the standoffs in yesterday, so they're getting installed today. It's a long and tedious process, but essentially what I do is just line them up with the holes, mark it out and then glue them into place. Yes, I know that there is a possibility of using an ATX motherboard template, but that didn't work as well for me. I'm also only installing mATX standoffs simply because an mATX board just fits more easily, yes, I can technically fit an ATX motherboard in, but there's a lot of cutting I would need to do. 

 

Anyway, this is how I'm doing the standoffs. 

 

 

 

That's not the final motherboard I'll be using, that's just a draft component which I'm using to mark out the standoffs. The standoffs are just the ones that came with the G5 case, I simply ripped them out with some pliers and am now gluing them back on in the right place. 

 

I went hardware shopping and found a ripper deal on a Corsair RM1000 PSU for $80. I bought that and put it into my main system, so the RM550 that's in there currently came out. I budgeted that as $50 for the RM550 for this project, which I think is fair. 

 

 

So I installed the PSU on the dividing bracket using some glue and zip ties which I looped into the fan grill on the PSU, it holds extremely securely. Note that the case in the pictures below is upside-down and that it'll have to stay in this position for about a day so that the glue sets and all. The bracket is actually near the top, so the PSU is actually being held up rather than down. The last picture from day 1 also had the case upside-down, I'm sure it'll be clear when the next set of pictures are out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next update is going to be a good one, going to boot it up for the first time with all the draft hardware and finally cut the old fan grills at the back to fill in the fan holes, hopefully that works, because if not, I might have to cover that with some perspex or something else. Stay tuned guys and thanks for reading. 

[PlayStation 2]

Got this bitch a follower on this thread. Looking very promising, OP!

[Heesleemer]

Snip  - I like cereal

 

I have my g5 case laying around here (made one and then sold it, bought another one because reasons) and that CPU heat sink cuts your fingers like crazed ex girlfriends cutting your tires.

 

how sturdy is the top panel, any bending due to the PSU weight? I had an idea to have all the hot air exhausted to the top section to be exhausted out the case... since it's such a large case.

[BuckGup]

I have a Mac G5 and I would never do this to it. Well that was the last good Apple computer, you could upgrade everything and it was an actual PC case that looked amazing

[paulsterio]

Got this bitch a follower on this thread. Looking very promising, OP!

 

Good to have you onboard, hope you enjoy the ride!

 

 

I have my g5 case laying around here (made one and then sold it, bought another one because reasons) and that CPU heat sink cuts your fingers like crazed ex girlfriends cutting your tires.

 

how sturdy is the top panel, any bending due to the PSU weight? I had an idea to have all the hot air exhausted to the top section to be exhausted out the case... since it's such a large case.

 

Yeah, the CPU heatsink is a bit rough, but I managed to just yank it out cleanly. The top panel is actually very sturdy, I reckon it can support much more than just a PSU, perhaps even a radiator would be possible. 

 

 

I have a Mac G5 and I would never do this to it. Well that was the last good Apple computer, you could upgrade everything and it was an actual PC case that looked amazing

 

Oh yeah, believe me, I felt sad ripping out all the hardware knowing that 10 years ago it would have been worth a pretty penny, but hey, I thought I'd breathe new life into the case and restore it as a modern Mac. 

[BuckGup]

 

Oh yeah, believe me, I felt sad ripping out all the hardware knowing that 10 years ago it would have been worth a pretty penny, but hey, I thought I'd breathe new life into the case and restore it as a modern Mac. 

Funny thing is I still use it to edit videos on a 5870

[Heesleemer]

Snip*

I'd like to make it so it has the option to put a triple rad, which would be nice, it's just so roomy to work in. 

 

 

"last good apple computer" except it used IBM chips, which is incompatible with virtually everything these days. 

[paulsterio]

Day 4 - Test-fitting with draft hardware and cutting the fan hole inserts

Okay, so there's a bit to do today, starting with cutting out the fan inserts. So there are a few holes at the back which are a little ugly, so I'm just going to cut the original inserts to size and hopefully they fill in the holes. 

 

These are the holes I'm referring to: 

 

 

 

[

 

So originally, it comes with a mesh cover, I've just marked it out and cut it as follows:

 

 

Fitting it in, everything looks pretty great (note the case is upside-down here):

 

 

 

Flipping the case so that it's right side up, everything looks great.

 

 

After a day of work, here's the workbench with all the tools - the soldering iron is out for modding the power button tomorrow and I've printed off a white label for the PSU, I don't think the original yellow label works well, I'll be sticking that on tomorrow as well. 

 

 

 

Lastly, here are the two original CPUs for the G5 which I'll be throwing out (don't have the space to keep them unfortunately). If you're local (in Melbourne) and want them, feel free to hit me up and you can have them - they probably don't work, but might make a good display on a cabinet. I'll be keeping the motherboard to hang on my wall as a decoration. 

 

 

Just as a general update, here's how the PSU is looking mounted on the top:

 

]

 

So that's all for this update, just to recap, today we managed to fill the fan holes at the back, mount all the test hardware and make a pretty big mess on the workbench. 

 

Modding the power button and a test boot is in order tomorrow. Since there's not as much to do, I'll hopefully be able to do some cleaning up of my work area too, so I can take some nicer photos of the system in progress for you all. See you for the Day 5 update!

[Tmt97]

Thanks for making this guide. This is a beautiful case. I really like apples asthetics when it comes to cases, and no other company can seem to pull off the look quite like them(except for maybe a few bitfenix cases). I had thought about doing something with this case for a while, but I know nothing about case modding, I might try to replicate your work one day.

[paulsterio]

I'd like to make it so it has the option to put a triple rad, which would be nice, it's just so roomy to work in. 

 

 

"last good apple computer" except it used IBM chips, which is incompatible with virtually everything these days. 

 

Yeah, the IBM chips is a little unfortunate, but I think we all knew that Intel Macs were coming when the G5 came out, it packed such a ridiculous amount of cooling. That said, I wonder how powerful the G5 would have been compared to something like the Athlon X2 or Pentium D from the era, it probably wouldn't have been able to hold a candle to Conroe though. 

 

 

Thanks for making this guide. This is a beautiful case. I really like apples asthetics when it comes to cases, and no other company can seem to pull off the look quite like them(except for maybe a few bitfenix cases). I had thought about doing something with this case for a while, but I know nothing about case modding, I might try to replicate your work one day.

 

Great to see you're enjoying it. I agree, I don't necessarily agree with Apple's philosophies on everything, but I think they do have a very keen eye for design and they're one of the companies bold enough to make great looking products (and make consumers pay for them, too). The G5 case certainly is excellent though. 

[paulsterio]

Day 5 - Modding the power button

Nice and easy work today, just modding the power button so that it leads out to a normal power button lead. You can also mod it so that the power LED works, I won't be doing this because I'm not much of a fan of power LEDs (I find them distracting when I'm trying to sleep and the system is on), so it's just the power button. 

 

 

 

 

 

Short update for now, but the next one will be big, I've got an ASUS P8Z68-M Pro + i7 2600K + 32GB DDR3 coming in today for $300 AUD (which is around $215 USD), so it's a ripper of a deal and the next update will be testing all the components, making sure they all work and preparing for a test fit. 

[Heesleemer]

is it the 2 outside solder points for the power button? 

[paulsterio]

is it the 2 outside solder points for the power button? 

 

This is the diagram I used:

 

[paulsterio]

Day 6 - Main hardware is here! 

A little bit of a story for you all today, which has been a seriously exciting day. I went and picked up all the hardware for the main build today, which consisted of:

• ASUS P8Z68M PRO
• Intel Core i7 2600K
• 16GB Kingston DDR3 RAM

I managed to get scammed in the process, but I'm still pretty happy with what I managed to pick up. So initially, the ad was for exactly that, except with 32GB of Kingston DDR3. All of that for $300 AUD is an excellent deal, so I was pretty keen to pick that up. Note that this is still less than a brand new i5 6600K by itself! I had the intention of selling 16GB of RAM for around $80 or so, enabling me to have a slightly bigger budget for the GPU and cooler. 

 

Obviously I checked the components when I was picking them up (though did not do a test boot). The RAM modules clearly say 8GB on each of them, so fair enough, it does look like 32GB, as you can see in the pictures below. When I got home, however, it was only registering as 16GB (4 x 4GB), so I thought that I had been scammed and the stickers had been replaced. However, upon further inspection, Kingston writes the capacity of the entire kit, so this is essentially two 8GB (2 x 4GB) kits, so what's been printed on each stick is the total kit capacity. Now, this is stupid. I checked with another Kingston kit I have and it's the same, I also have a kit of Strontium RAM, that came in a 2 x 4GB kit, each stick says 4GB as it should. 

 

So did the seller know that it was actually 16GB? I don't know, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, though the fact that he hasn't replied to my messages asking about it is shady. Either way, it doesn't matter, $300 for that much hardware is still a good deal, not excellent, but still pretty good, given that people were after $200 for a 2600K alone and that mATX Z68 boards are pretty hard to come buy. 

 

Anyway, some pictures of the new haul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's all a bit dirty and in need of some cleaning, but that's nothing I can't do. Obviously the first thing I needed to do was to make sure it POSTs and everything works as it should. Great to say that it was a success (though note it says 16GB RAM, even though each stick misleadingly says 8GB). 

 

 

 

Here it is in all of its glory running on my table. Windows was installed and everything was tested. It all works great. 

 

 

 

 

I managed to run some benchmarks at stock and the thing clocks in around 610 in Cinebench R15 slightly throttled (it was in the 90s for the entire time), so suffice to say, the stock cooler isn't doing a good enough job. I'll see how it goes after I push it with an aftermarket cooler. I haven't decided on what to get yet, but I'll have to think about it. I do like air coolers, but an AIO might suit this better because it places less weight on the motherboard. The standoffs are glued on, so I'm not sure how much they can hold. 

 

Right now, I'm installing OSX, so I better get back to that, but with tomorrow's update, I'll also make sure to talk about why I've decided to go with Sandy Bridge and how I think it stacks up against the latest and greatest from Intel. So that's it for quite an eventful day. Thanks for tuning in guys. 

[Heesleemer]

Be careful on CPU cooler high clearance - personal experience. 

[Sithhy]

Day 6 - Main hardware is here!

So happy to see it done & working [emoji1]

[paulsterio]

Day 7 - Installing OSX and Why Sandy Bridge?

I'm happy to report that OSX has successfully been installed. Perks of installing on such an older system is that it's relatively easy and painfree to install because everything is supported. I used the iMac 12,2 (Sandy Bridge) system definition and used the bootflags "-v npci=0x2000 IgpuEnabler=Yes". After that, everything flowed painlessly. 

 

I want to address why I decided to go with Sandy Bridge today. In my eyes, there have been several moments throughout history where Intel really moved forward the entirety of personal computing. Most people would recall Conroe (the original Core 2 Duo) as the moment Intel became competitive in mainstream desktop computing again. From there, improvements were logical and as expected. The move to Nehalem was big, but fundamentally not as significant as it seems in hindsight. Westmere was small (similar to what Broadwell ended up being on desktops) and the big move was Sandy Bridge, which (per core, per GHz) beat out Nehalem by around 30%. That's huge. Ever since then, improvements have been incremental and small. Haswell was a nice bump, but Skylake is pretty disappointing from a performance standpoint. 

 

Let's have a look at some charts. Below, I've presented Cinebench R10 Single Threaded scores (to neutralise for core count - even though all are quad cores, and HT). This demonstrates the architecture performance. I've also presented a clock speed equalised graph, which shows the score per GHz, so it's a comparison as if the CPUs were clocked at the same clock speed and lastly, I've provided the percentage improvement over the last generation. 

 

 

Of course, what is striking is that up until Sandy Bridge, we see a pretty clear exponential increase in performance, as per Moore's Law, but after that, we've seen a much more logarithmic model. For the mathematicians out there, the two most common models for growth are exponential and logarithmic. This is because the underlying equations are differential equations (usually first order). Either the rate of growth is increasing as the population increases (this is like bacteria growth, because each splits into two...etc.) or the rate of growth decreases as the population increases (this is like human growth, people grow much quicker when they are young and the rate of growth slows as they grow older). 

 

Essentially, the first case is a first order differential equation in exponentials and the second is a first order differential equation in inverses. The first leads to an exponential model of growth (the integral of an exponential is an exponential) and the second leads to a logarithmic model of growth (the integral of an inverse i.e. 1/x is the natural log). 

 

Moore's law postulates that performance increases are exponential, but have we reached a point of inflection of sorts and are now starting to see diminishing returns (i.e. a logarithmic model of growth), I guess we will have to wait and see. 

 

The point is, the gains Sandy Bridge had were huge, 30% per core, per GHz over Nehalem and even greater if you consider performance as a whole without looking at clock speed (as SB had a massive clock increase compared to Nehalem). So when you own Sandy Bridge, you own a piece of history and it'll be a while before Intel releases something that's worth upgrading to. 

 

Boring day, but just some background info. Tomorrow will be more interesting for sure, stay tuned!