Anyone here built their own mac?

[Darien]

Just wondering. It sounds like a neat project...wouldn't know where to begin though 😱



If you have,pics? 😀



EDIT: making title with "more correct" english...or something like that?

 

[Darien]

No response so far.



Well, if any of you see any good articles on the topic and sites to buy things like PS and hsf, please respond 😀

 

[Lord Evermore]

Technically you can't build your own Macintosh. Macintosh is a brand name indicating a computer built and sold by Apple.

I didn't even know you could get individual components for a PowerPC machine. Can you even install MacOS on a non-Apple system, if you can get a non-Apple motherboard?

 

[DrVos]

I've always wanted to do this, but a home built mac is still pretty expensive. I assume you've check this site before?
Linky They talk about what would be involved in building your own mac.

It is not possible to build your own mac without an apple logic board and cpu. You will also need a mac compatible graphics card. I was really interested in theidea of building my own mac til i started browsing around for processors. $800 for a 1ghz processor? I checked ebay and the best I could find was a G4 800mhz cpu for $260. GEEEEEEEZ.

 

[Remedy]

If you go over to Ars-technica forums and check the out the Mac forum. Do a search on it over there. There is a huge thread about building it as there are guys over there who have and are still currently building G4 Macs with 3rd party componenets.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: ReMeDy{WcS}
If you go over to Ars-technica forums and check the out the Mac forum. Do a search on it over there. There is a huge thread about building it as there are guys over there who have and are still currently building G4 Macs with 3rd party componenets.

The thread title (for easier searching) was "Build yer own" I think.

 

[DrVos]

Im checking it out right now:
Link to the discussion

It sounds like building a mac is very do-able, but time consuming and still pretty expensive compared to building pc's. Still, i am very intrigued...

 

[Remedy]

Thanks Nocy. The new UI over there is horrific. 🙁

 

[DrVos]

Wow, it seems the things that keep the the idea of bulding your own mack prohibitive are the cost of the psu and the cpu
a 2x500 will set you back around $500
and the required 22pin apple PSU will set you back $180. You can convert a pc psu to work with a Mac, but soldering scares me 🙁

According, to the guys on the ArsTech forum, it seems that you dont save a whole lot of money building your own Mac, hmm I might hafta just buy one....

 

[EeyoreX]

IMHO that is one of the big reasons Mac is not where the PC is today, stinginess with hardware. If they made the hardware more accessible I think more people would use it. Personally, I hate Macs, but I do appreciate they are better at many things than PCs are, but I feel they shot themselves in the foot by making too much "propietary" hardware. If they had only opened up more, I think we'd all be using Macs instead of PCs. Just my opinion.

\Dan

 

[Remedy]

Sigh...

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: EeyoreX
IMHO that is one of the big reasons Mac is not where the PC is today, stinginess with hardware. If they made the hardware more accessible I think more people would use it. Personally, I hate Macs, but I do appreciate they are better at many things than PCs are, but I feel they shot themselves in the foot by making too much "propietary" hardware. If they had only opened up more, I think we'd all be using Macs instead of PCs. Just my opinion.

\Dan

Everything is pretty standard in a Mac except the equivilent of the chipset...

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: EeyoreX
IMHO that is one of the big reasons Mac is not where the PC is today, stinginess with hardware. If they made the hardware more accessible I think more people would use it. Personally, I hate Macs, but I do appreciate they are better at many things than PCs are, but I feel they shot themselves in the foot by making too much "propietary" hardware. If they had only opened up more, I think we'd all be using Macs instead of PCs. Just my opinion.

\Dan

Hmmm... Not this again. Anyways, have you ever looked inside a Mac?

Case: The PowerMac case is the easiest access tower case design I've ever seen. Just one latch and the whole thing opens up gracefully, with instant access to everything.

Video card: Standard AGP Geforce 4 or Radeon 9000 series, although with custom firmware.

Hard Drives: Standard ATA100 7200 RPM drives

Memory: Standard DDR RAM

Network: Standard 10/100/1000 Ethernet (built-in)

Wireless: Standard 802.11b wireless

Slots: Standard PCI slots

Optical drives: Standard IDE optical drives

Peripherals: USB or Firewire. (I use my Microsoft mouse/keyboard as well as my Firewire drives both with my Mac and PC.)

BTW when they did have clone makers, all it did was increase the number of driver issues and conflicts. No surprise there.

 

[Lord Evermore]

All standard, and they only charge you double for the privilege. 🙂

Unfortunately, all the standard components in the world don't help you build a MacOS machine with any motherboard or processor you want.

 

[Darien]

Argh. I always wanted to have my own mac...guess building one is out of the question.

$800 for a 1ghz processor? I checked ebay and the best I could find was a G4 800mhz cpu for $260. GEEEEEEEZ.

Good lord, that much for a processor more than a year old!? :Q

 

[EeyoreX]

I think part of my point (granted, i didn't make it very well I understand) was that even with all the standard components that are used, that is not very useful in building your own Mac when the "base" items are not. having standard drives memory etc don't do a whole lot of good when you can't easily get your hands on the Mac part to connect them to...

\Dan

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
All standard, and they only charge you double for the privilege. 🙂

Unfortunately, all the standard components in the world don't help you build a MacOS machine with any motherboard or processor you want.

Name an OS I can do that with.