I've really grown to like the look of the blue and white Power Mac G3 tower lately, and really felt the need to have one as a daily driver. In the looks department anyways. This spawned the idea of ATX-modding the case of said computer.
As luck would have it, I asked around on another forum, and one of the users there happened to have a nice condition one destined for the scrapyard. So it was picked up from death row for free, including an internal ZIP250-drive, new-old-stock keyboard and mouse.
I didn't feel like documenting the whole modding process, because it really wasn't that interesting anyways.
I started by stripping the old internals out of it, and placed the new motherboard down, aligning its expansion slots with the rear case slots and started drilling holes, cutting things out to make room, etc. This process is just a whole bunch of trial and error until you're done pretty much. One little quirk on the back, however, is that the onboard audio ports do not fit the I/O plate opening in the case. this required them to have the sticky-outy-plastic-bits snipped off to make the motherboard fit. This renders said ports absolutely unusable. But since I'm not using onboard audio anyways, this wasn't a big deal.
The case got some metal parts cut out to make room for the CPU cooler, and the original power supply got its rear piece cut away and reused as power input/output, and mount for what is now the rear case fan.
It turned out to be a pretty slick mod, all things considered. Everything is working as it should. Even the internal ZIP drive got an IDE-USB adapter to connect it to the motherboard. (This adapter sucks however. An IDE-SATA adapter is ordered)
Even the internal speaker got a new lease on life. I rummaged around and found a cheapo MP3 player module with built in amplifier that plays the Mac 'bong' each time the system is powered on, for that extra cheese-flare. lol.
Spec-wize it's an AMD Ryzen 3 3100, 16GB DDR4 RAM, Nvidia Quadro K4200 and a 500GB m.2 NVMe SSD.
Oh, and a 2TB spinning-rust box I had laying around.
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- g3home.jpeg (88.93 KiB) Viewed 50554 times
