Introduction: A PC in a Mac
Having a day off from school left me really bored, so I decided that I would finish a project I had started after reading gmjhowe's instructable on rebuilding a Mac with PC parts.
I already had the case, power supply, cd drive and fans, but I still needed the hard drive and motherboard.
Now that I had the parts, I decided to spend my day off finishing one of my many unfinished projects.
I used another Powermac 7200 case, I still have many laying around from another day off when I picked up several older Macs.
The computer parts that were used were:
-300W (maybe 350W) 20 pin ATX power supply, modified to fit.
-Intel D945GTP desktop motherboard, I have since gotten a lot of these...
-Intel Pentium D 3.2GHz dual core processor
-CD-RW drive
-200GB sata hard drive
Instead of an instructable, I chose to just do a slideshow since I forgot to take pictures along the way.
Armed with heavy duty wire cutters and pliers, I began to tear out the grille from under the macs PSU. (After disassebling the rest of the mac, of course)
Now I had a uniform hole that the CPU cooler just barely fits through, this allowed the heat to stay in the lower part of the case and the CPU could get clean, fresh air.
I then mounted the board with standoffs and some epoxy, but the only way it would fit was with the I/O ports to the left of the machine's shell, which means that I'll have to invest in some extenstion cords for everything.
Next up was power. I used an old Delta power supply, but it was a 20-pin without the added 4 pin plug for the 12v at the CPU. I countered this by jamming a 4 pin plug from a dead power supply to the 12v on 2 power connectors. It has worked before without problems, why not now?
Mounting it gave me a headache, it was probably the hardest part of the whole build. With the CPU cooler where the old power supply was, I had to put it somewhere else. I opted for near the front on the machine, in the hard drive bay. I cut off the upper hard drive bay and moved the hard drive to the spot where the floppy drive used to go. Then I epoxied some plastic bits to the edges of the bay to hold up the power supply.
Then I used half of the old power supply's shell so I wouldn't have to make some sort of plug panel or something.
But then the wires on the power socket and voltage switch were too short, some 18 AWG wire fixed that in a heartbeat.
The hard drive and CD drive were pretty straightforward, I used the mounting rack for the CD drive, and used the method of mounting a floppy drive to mount the hard drive.
Once everything was connected I booted it up (For the first time) and after making sure nothing was smoking, I began to install Windows XP. (Yes, I know it's odd to install Windows on a Mac, but I can't stand Mac OSX, plus none of my favourite programs run on Mac.)
And so, I present to you, the Mac PC.
Here's a short little video of it, please remember to vote for me in the Makerbot Challenge if you like it!

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11 Comments
12 years ago on Introduction
Brilliant work!
You could give it a bit of a clean on top though!
Thanks for linking me up, it is great to see what others have gone on to do after seeing my project.
Reply 12 years ago on Introduction
I plan to give it a nice cleaning after i finish up the I/O ports, right now im working on getting original mac noises to go with it, so far ive gotten the start up tone, i still need to find the error noises though.
Reply 7 years ago
how did you program it to get the start up sounds?
9 years ago on Introduction
You can make a Hackintosh with this
10 years ago on Introduction
What OS do you use??? I have windows Xp downloaded on a dell XPS t500 beast from 1999. i also modified the power button in mine. it was old cruddy green leds and now it is High power blues ones. Looks awesome.
Reply 10 years ago on Introduction
it ran Windows XP.
12 years ago on Introduction
YES! Take that Apple and associated fanboys! *cough* gmjhowe
Reply 12 years ago on Introduction
I am pro-choice. If there was only one option for computers, we would not be able to meet the dynamics and differences in each unique individual.
Reply 12 years ago on Introduction
I would have mentioned my friend Sheldon, but he's not an ibler AFAIK.
Reply 12 years ago on Introduction
C: one more reason there should be a like button.
12 years ago on Introduction
or this could be called an 'upgrade' :) (if perfomed on any mac <.< )