Hi Mike! I regularly read your site and think it's great that you
provide the mac community with such a great hardware related site!
I've always been interested in user comments regarding homemade
mac->PC case conversions. Well, this spring break a friend of mine
and I decided to massively void our G4 warranties by transplanting
them into InWin A500-ATX midtowers. There were several very important
issues that you might want to make your readers aware of at some
point.
First off, buy the full tower versions. DO NOT buy the midtower if
you want a second or third 5.25" drive to fit fully inside the case.
:) Basically I bought the midtower (midtower=$50, full=$90) so that I
could have both the DVD drive that came with the G4 AND my SCSI CD
burner internal. That's the only reason that I was willing to do
this...The motherboard mounts pretty much like a standard ATX PC
motherboard will. The screw holes are not correct however, so we had
to mark and drill our own. With a few cheap radio shack standoffs and
3 mount points, we had the board fairly stable. Once we had mounted
the motherboard and put it inside the case along with all the drives,
we realized that the RAM slots block the lower 2 5.25" bays from
having a drive fully inside the case (it will hang out by 1/4-1/2 of
an inch when it's flush against the RAM slots). That is why I'd
recommend people buy a full tower case or one of the larger
mid-towers.
The ATX power supply that came with the mid tower did not have a long
enough ATX power connector to reach to the G4's power port on the
bottom of the motherboard (it's in a really odd position compared to
a PC board) so we ended up just swapping out the original power
supply with the G4's power supply which has a long ATX power
connector on it. That worked great and all the screw holes line up
nicely (it's nice having that pass through plug on the power
supply!). Another issue that may pop up with owners of the InWin full
towers is that again they may need an even longer ATX power connector
to reach the G4's power port is the default power supply's isn't long
enough.
Next, the G4's motherboard power, power LED, and reset switches
(along with the programmer's switch but we didn't bother with that
one) are all wired into a single, 10 pin ribbon cable instead of
separate wires like I assume that Beige G3/266 was that you have an
article on. Through trial and error and tracing the paths on the
little circuit board with the actual power buttons, LED, etc. I was
able to determine which of the pins were used...If you are interested
I could pop the case open and figure it out again. There was a common
ground pin and one pin for the power, power LED, and reset switches.
So, to clarify, we kept the ribbon cable plugged into the G4
motherboard and instead of having it connect to the G4's little
circuit board with all the power lights, buttons on it, we stuck bits
of wire into the end of the ribbon cable port and stuck them into the
case's connectors. It wasn't the optimal solution but it does
minimize the amount of permanent "damage" that we had to do to the G4
and the case in case (no pun intended :)) we ever wanted to either
put the G4 back in the original case or put a PC motherboard into the
InWin case.
Once we figured that out and wired everything up and had our CD
burners sticking out of the case a little bit, we also removed part
of the backpanel on the motherboard tray. We only needed to remove it
along with a tiny piece of metal in between the back panel and the
expansion slots in order to make room for all the ports on the G4
motherboard. This will be the same regardless of whether you use the
InWin mid or full towers since the motherboard trays are virtually
identical from what I've seen. Since we didn't have access to good
metal cutting/folding tools, we used a single piece of clear, thin
plexiglass as our port cover. It was really thin and cutting out port
holes just wasn't working so we melted our own holes. :)
As a finishing touch, we replaced the default green power LED with a
nice blue one (again from radio shack) that makes the computer look
amazingly cool. =) Also, though the plexiglass was far from a
professional solution, being able to see inside the case while it's
completely closed is really neat. The red LED on the G4 motherboard
casts a nice glow through the plexiglass. Oh, for ventilation we
stuck a case fan inside the case directly above the G4 heatsink. Once
that was there, the G4 actually stays quite a bit cooler than when it
was in its original case!
Sorry for the long winded answer but I want to make sure that I don't
leave any important details out so others won't have the same
problems we did.
Finally, as for optmizing your Quake 3 config file, I'd use vertex
lighting, turn off v-sync, turn off the sky, and set cg_gibs 0. This
will reduce but not eliminate some of the blood that sprays when you
get a kill. Just turning off the gibs boosted my demo01 scores by 5
fps or so and really doesn't make too much of a visual difference. :)
If you have any more questions about the G4 case conversion please
let me know. I'd be happy to write something formal up for you if
you'd like. [ I've asked for this and photos of the finished case
for an article-Mike]
I'm sure I left a few things out. However, our machines
are perfectly stable and fully fuctional (except for the programmer's
switch since we didn't care about that :). It'd be easy to add
anyway). The CD drive sticking out a bit annoys me but it's a small
price to pay for having up to 3 CD/DVD/etc drive bays internal to the
G4.
"
