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Case Tweaking

Posted by Hemos on from the pretty-cool-hack dept.

A reader writes "I don't know what they were smoking, but these guys decided that the G4 case makes for a great LAN party box. Of course, without the G4 and all that yucky Mac hardware -- just the aesthetics. They go about hacking and modding the case, turning a low power (aka, weak) x86 box and toss it into the G4 casing, and don't end up destroying the case to make everything fit. Lotsa pictures and explanations of every step in the process"

3 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Re:G4 is by far the nicest consumer case I've ever by Rand+Race · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The problem in the x86 case area is the noted chintziness of PC buyers. Just look at anything Apple related that gets posted on /., it inevetibly devolves into "Macs cost to much, I can get a PC for $300!". Yea you can, and the case will be like the Bene Gesserit human testing box; "What's in it?"... "Pain!"... keep a lot of Neosporine and Band-Aids handy when you add internals and don't have anything planned for a while. Nobody is willing to lay down the investment in the PC market because the vast majority of the DIY propellerheads are cheap bastards and the industrial designers will never recoup their investment and be left hiding out in shanty-town flophouses with bottles of cheap rotgut clenched in their palsied hands moaning incesantly about their great ideas for easy-access case designs.

    --
    Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
  2. My G4 / How many FPS do you want? by green+pizza · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My machine at work is an older G4/533... (533 MHz PowerPC 7410, 512 MB of CAS-3 [slower] PC133 SDRAM, and the stock OEM nVIDIA GeForce2 MX). While 95% of my time (ok, 85%, but don't tell my boss) is spent in Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Cleaner 5, I have installed and played with some of the latest wizbang games. Quake 3, FAKK2, DeusEx, and UT all play very smoothly. "Timedemo" benchmarks show numbers in the 50 - 75 frame-per-second area. Just how much better does a game player need? I would imagine that the GeForce 3 gives even better performance, as well as the CPU improvements in the current G4s (733, 800, and 867 MHz PowerPC 7450). And who doesn't replace the stock mouse with a real one? Just like I did with my old Dell, the first thing I did was buy a nice 3 button scroll-wheel mouse. Works great in Mac OS 9.1 and OS X.

    Sure the Mac is no gamer's dream, but it plays games as well as I would ever want. Plus it's a great workhorse.

  3. Re:Uhh...wait a minute.. by repetty · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Oh, great... now I'll have to cancel the LAN party I had planned for two weeks from now AND apologize for all the fun we've been having at the dozens fo LAN parties I've hosted since around '95.

    They were all Mac-only shindigs.

    I've got to mention the most amazing thing I saw in all that time, though. It was something so brief that I might have missed it since I was busy setting up systems and greeting people...

    This guy shows up to the gaming session with a green iMac. He walks in carrying every damn thing he needs, plugs in, and is booting in about ten seconds. Within a minute of arriving, he's gaming!

    My other buddies still drag around CPU boxes, cables, monitors, towels to wipe sweat from their foreheads, etc., etc., etc.

    I learned that day that the iMac is one MF'n great game machine.

    --Richard