Wolf In Mac Clothing
August 2nd 2009 – Adam Bauman

 

Let me start out by mentioning that the last time I purchased a new case for my computer I was still living with my parents, nearly ten years ago. It was an Antec Dragon full-size tower and I had loved it to death. Over the years it was lugged around to countless LAN parties, abused heavily during my younger years and it had been chopped and hacked up after every upgrade to incorporate new features. I added 120mm fan inlets, an upper 120mm outlet and I even shamed it with neon lights, a window and undercarriage red LED lighting.

 

Once I had outgrown my rebelious case modifying days I promised myself that I would purchase a new case when the next upgrade cycle came about and would give the Dragon a fitting burial. The opportunity came over the winter when my venerable AGP graphics card went tits up. I didn’t go overboard on upgrading but did need to install a motherboard that had some PCI Express ports and managed to score a pretty decent processor upgrade and some much beefier graphics hardware.

After my pile of new parts had stopped growing I began looking for that replacement case and was having a very difficult time finding something that compared favorably to my trusty Dragon. As luck would have it my employer had sent me out for Apple certification and it was there I got to handle my first MacPro, the MacPro is a genuine work of art and is cased in a solid aluminum chassis that’s very easy to work with and exhibits some excellent airflow characteristics. It was then that I remembered reading of some brave pioneers that long ago managed to cram a PC’s guts into the original G5 Powermac cases which were very similiar to the MacPro cases. After some research I found a few ideas for my own HackMac and began ordering parts.

At the time I was unable to locate any inexpensive MacPro casings so I turned to the PowerMac. I lucked out again and scored a case that was in excellent condition and was stuffed with all the trays, buttons and other tidbits required to make this modification work. The rest of my shopping list was pretty simple, I just needed some perforated 1/16″ aluminum stock as well as some hardware. For the motherboard mounting I would rip out the trusty Dragon’s motherboard tray and modify it to fit.

The build itself only took a few days and turned out nicely, all of my components fit perfectly and airflow has proven to be more than adequete to keep everything cool and it manages to stay pretty quiet. Check out the build pictures below to see how it turned out!

 

HackMac Virgin	Hack Mac Rear Cut	HackMac Mobo Tray	HackMac Mobo Tray Rear
HackMac Rear Panel Fills	HackMac 92mm Fan Panel	HackMac HDD Assembly	HackMac HDD Mounted
HackMac HDD Fan Assembly	HackMac Front Fan Assembly	HackMac Fans and HDD Tray Mounted	HackMac Front Panel
HackMac Pre Motherboard	HackMac Side	HackMac Rear Quarter	HackMac Back Panel