Build Your Own Mac With CoreCrib Kit

Mark Dobie writes "I just put up a quick review of the CoreCrib kit I purchased. It is an inexpensive solution to building your own Mac." See our previous Core coverage.

Comments

Mirror

[NETHED]

Before it went KABAM, I made a quicky mirror

here

Waiting for PPC 970

[aSiTiC]

Personally I'm waiting to switch for the release of the PPC 970 to switch from my Windows box to a OSX box.

Can't wait to get away from x86 micro-ops translation to RISC and into the world of straight RISC.

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[discstickers]

Steps to take:
1) Buy old(er) G4 tower
2) Replace graphics card with said 8500Pro
3) Install hard drives
4) Theres no step 4!

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[afidel]

The PPC970 is not a pure RISC chip, if it were the decode stage would be unnecessary. There are a number of instructions that break down into two or more internal operations that the execution units have to deal with. From the IBM POWER whitepaper "Cracked instructions flow into groups as any other instructions with one restriction. Both IOPs must be in the same group. If both IOPs cannot fit into the current group, the group is terminated and a new group is initiated. The instruction following the cracked instruction may be in the same group as the cracked instruction, assuming there is room in the group. Millicoded instructions always start a new group. The instruction following the millicoded instruction also initiates a new group." This is much closer to CISC->RISC translation that happens in all modern x86 cpu's then it is to a traditional RISC design.

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[DreadSpoon]

Like this self-built box states, you _can_ drop in your own hard-drives, AGP cards, and everything.

The only palces Apple breaks compatibility is where their tech is _better_. ADC is awesome, I wish PC manufacturer's would adopt - I have _way_ too many cables behind my computer desk. Some goes for their slick way of hooking the mouse into the keyboard (less cabling, again). You can get away with five cables from your tower (power, adc, keyboard, speakers, network), only one from your display (adc), a cable from mouse to keyboard and keyboard to tower, and the cables hooking speakers together and then from there to tower. Plus you have a spare USB port on your keyboard (tablet, portable drive, whatever) plus two more on the modern displays.

Compare that to the >10 cables on my machine, and then having to have the cables running back behind the machine versus having even simple things like USB literally at my fingertips...

The only other big non-compatibility thing is the CPU architecture, but who cares? The prevalence of Java (and soon perhaps .NET) alleviates a large amount of that, and virtual PC helps a lot for business apps.

I'm waiting for the PPC 970 myself, but I'm switching then; depending on how good Panther is, I might even dump Linux then. ~,^

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, yep, yep. Check it out for yourself: http://www.apple.com/powermac/specs.html

Of course, if you want to pick up a slightly older model, there will be some differences. But the PowerMacs of the last several years have used pretty standard parts. My QuickSilver 733 (previous generation) has IDE, ATAPI, and PC133 memory (no DDR). I'd definitely check out the AGP thing though too, because I've also heard that it's slightly different. I do believe ATI makes different versions of their cards for Mac vs PC, but maybe it's just a marketing thing to get the Macheads to pay more?? Never tried swapping video cards, but I can assure you from personal experience that everything else is standard and works across PC or Mac.

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[Mirus Nex]

say... would Apple also be following industry standard on ATAPI devices? How about DDR ram? and PCI cards (like my new Audigy 2?) (Things I'de LOVE to know before I upgrade again)

Yes. You should be able to install just about any OS supported IDE CD-ROM drive in a newer tower. My 1GHz at work has 3 IDE intefaces ATA/100, ATA/66 and ATA and supports ATAPI (using cable select). As for PCI it supports PCI 2.1 at 33MHz (5, 12 or 3.3v). AGP is 1.5V 4x. The new systems support PC2100 and PC2700 (depending on model) DDR RAM, but doesn't take advantage of it (more of a marketing thing than performance)...

The only problem is OS support, if you can't find drivers for your card you're kind of SOL... Audigy isn't support (AFAIK) though SoundBlaster Live! is.

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[physicsnerd]

say... would Apple also be following industry standard on ATAPI devices? How about DDR ram? and PCI cards (like my new Audigy 2?) (Things I'de LOVE to know before I upgrade again)

Yes apple does follow the standard on ATAPI Devices. Apple just sticks standard CD/DVD drives in their systems.

Yes they do use Standard DDR ram, in the higher end machines, PC133 in the lower machines like the eMac. Also, the laptop ram is standard SO-DIMM 133 or DDR in the case of the 17".

Yes, PCI cards can be put in the powermac line. I'm not sure if the Audigy 2 has OSX drivers. This tends to be the largest problem I've had with mac hardware. Macs use the exact same standards as PCs, however not all companies will write OSX drivers for them. However, often the *nix/bsd hardware hacks work. Epson never has gotten around to writting drivers for my SS2500, however I use CUPS and it works perfect.

In conclusion, Apple runs the same basic hardware as everyone else. The difference is in the PPC chip, and of course the bios. Everything else is industry standard.

physicsnerd

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[squiggleslash]

They've been following most of these standards for a while. I got a Beige G3 from eBay a few months ago. The keyboard/mouse bus was non-standard (ie not PS/2 or USB, it used Apple's ADB system), and the serial and video ports were non-standard (usable with convertors)

Everything else was standard. I plugged in PCI USB2 card - labelled as compatable with God-knows how many versions of Windows - and was able to attach a standard keyboard. An adapter was what was needed to attach a VGA monitor. I went got a Maxtor 40Gb HD, and that worked out of the box. No mention of Macs on the box either.

All of that was what I needed to install OS X.

Of course it also has SCSI built in, but you can't really complain that's non-standard even if it's relatively unusual.

Since then I've installed cheap CDRW/DVD drives and such without any problems (beyond initially having to hack the odd OS X driver.)

I think the notion of the "non-standard" Apple has been out of date for many years. It's just not Windows compatable hardware.

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it just be faster to do this at compile time? Then you would EPIC (i.e., IA-64). In short, it would not be backward compatible.

have faster chips with fewer transistors

Who wants fewer transistors???? :-) The more transistors the canonical CPU "has to have" the fewer players than can be in the market. Somewhat cynical, but most companies would like fewer competitors rather than more. Yes the original RISC principles were to do more with a small transistor budget. The thought was that would allow you to get onto bleeding edge process technologies sooner. Unfortunately, that is an advantage that can be negated by the application of lots of money.

Intel doesn't want to sell $1.50 CPUs. :-)

Plus more transitors typically mean more speed (given a decent design)

However, the "break down to RISC" instructions is a bit misnomer. Breaking opcodes into micro-codes wasn't what RISC was trying to avoid. It was putting microcode ("programs") into the silicon that RISC was trying to avoid. However, as programs (e.g., branch caching algorithms) become extremely well understood the risk of etching them into silicon goes way down. Factor some of the modern design aid and design automation tools and it goes down even further.

According to Patternson the canonical CISC chip was the Intel 432.

The x86 is baroque more so that it is "bad" CISC.

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[0rbit4l]

As I'm sure has been pointed out, you'd still need a decode stage in almost any but the most useless risc architecture - got to convert those opcodes to control lines (regwrite, memwrite/read) and register fields. This doesn't come "for free", even with simple risc architectures like MIPS. Ergo, you need a decode stage. More complexity simply means more stages dedicated to decode (a la x86, power series.)

Another point: POWER is not the same thing as the PowerPC ISA. POWER (which is cisc) supports some wacky instruction types such as vector load/store - these get cracked into IOPs. The vast majority of PPC instructions do not need to be cracked, though cracking can be useful depending on the microarchitecture that implements the ISA (for instance, fused multiply-add which is common in multimedia apps may get cracked into 2 separate instructions.)

Re:Waiting for PPC 970

[catscan2000]

The hard drives should work in a Mac, but the video card probably won't due to differences in the card's firmware. PC video cards typically have a PC x86 video BIOS built in while Mac video cards have something else, perhaps an OpenFirmware thingie that lets the system's firmware start up the video card and video display.

I've actually tried to put a ATI Xclaim TV PCI Mac card into a PC only to get no video at all in the PC, though Linux booted anyway. I tried to see if XFree86 could somehow handle it, but alas I couldn't get it to work properly. I even tried compiling and running Linux with various ATI framebuffer console settings (man, I must have had a lot more free time than I do now! Though, such toil seems quite boring to me now. Speaking of now-seemingly boring toil, I need to figure out what to do with my basement full of I-Openers, but that's another story). It comes right up on the Mac (a G4 450MHz system).

SLASHDOTTED

[rkz]

Here is a mirror: Click here I couldnt get all of the images though.

Re:Please explain...

[eXtro]

The price of the dual 1.2 GHz kit is $1349, you could throw in 256 meg of ram and an 80 gig hard drive in for around 120 bucks, probably less.

I considered corecrib

[OmniVector]

But then i found out about this site: www.purchaseprogram.com. I haven't bought a system from there yet, but even after you pay the $250 fee, and tax, and shipping, you can still get a kick ass dual 1.25ghz powermac for less than the spare parts that corecrib offers.

Re:I considered corecrib

[WebMacher]

Yep, it's a scam. MacDV had a long discussion about it. Go to http://lists.themacintoshguy.com/Lists/MacDV/List. html and search for "Marbella".

Re:I considered corecrib

[ziggy_zero]

This is what's called a straight-line matrix scheme, my friend. It's a scam.

For more info on pyramid or "matrix" schemes, check this out.

There are tons of sites like that out there, offering laptops, x-boxes, plasma TV's, etc. I know it's tempting, but don't send them your money, whatever you do.

Main text (sans pictures)

[mrklin]

from the /. page:

My first Mac was a Beige G3 junked from work. I upgraded it to the max, but found it lacking the speed needed to run OS X. I started looking into buying a Power Mac but I was turned off by the inflated prices. $1500 for a box w/ no monitor? Insane. I like Apple's constant innovation but their prices are way too high. I finally came across this story about John Fraser, and his idea to sell a Mac kit aimed at do-it-yourselfers. I've built quite a few PC's but never a Mac. I decided this was the route for me.

My core crib arrived on Sat. May 3, 2003.

As you can see, it arrives in a non-descript brown box from USPS.

The packaging was done well. The CoreCrib was secure in the box and was not damaged. Contents include, power cable, tower case, Apple Gigabit Ethernet motherboard, Apple Power Supply and blue/pink LED case fan. This is a very barebones kit. Provide your own IDE cables, drives, processesor, memory, video card etc....

I had an old Beige G3 I decided I'd rob parts out of. Most of what was in that box was old PC hardware I had laying around. At first, I could not get the Crib to boot, I checked the support forums and noticed that the only other person who had received a CoreCrib kit said you "HAD" to update the firmware on the motherboard. I assumed this was my problem. So I put the Crib aside and tried to track down an older G4 processor.

On Tues. May 6 another post arrived in the forums that the firmware was not needed to run newer CPUs. I then decided to investigate on my own. After an hour of testing, my problem was solved. The PC100 memory I tried to use from the Beige G3 did not like the faster G4 800 Giga Designs processor. I put a stick of PC133 memory in and the Crib instantly booted.

Here are some pictures of the box itself.

Here are some photos after my parts were installed:

Back plane is missing. Personally I don't care, I push it under a desk.

The Crib has changed colors and price. It is now available as Pro model and comes in a nice gmono white case. http://www.2khappyware.com/corecrib.html

My current expense list:

CoreCrib kit: $379, Gigadesigns G4 800 cpu, $275, 256mb pc133 $20, ATI Radeon PCI 7000, $100 The other parts I installed were extras from upgrading PC's. I've spent $775 on this machine and it runs OS X smoothly and without problems. I did purchase OS 10.2. I forgot to include that in the price. 2khappyware also sells complete and custom systems, you can add whatever parts you want if you don't want to buy them on your own. This case is expandable, you can add up to 5 hard-drives and multiple optical drives. Which is much different than the new Mirrored Power Macs. My next stop is to add the Radeon 8500 AGP card, the PCI card doesn't do Quartz Graphics.

Overall I'm extremely happy with the Crib. The noise level is very low. No windtunnel noise going on here. It is upgradable to dual CPU's if you want to spend the cash. A new Support Forum has started flourishing, so help is available. I highly recommend buying this kit.

Parts purchasing:

http://www.macsales.com

Information:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/
- Permalink
Posted by Mark Dobie on 5/7/03; 11:36:45 AM

Apple sells refurbished Macs

[Andrew Lockhart]

It's silly to compare these kits to a brand new Mac when Apple themselves sell refurbished products.Keep in mind that the refurb'ed PowerMacs already come with ram, an hd, graphics, a superdrive, an os, etc. Oh yeah, they also have a one year warranty from Apple and are still eligible for their AppleCare Protection Plan. Two things that I doubt these kits have.

Re:Aw man

[Sethb]

I'm the admin of the server in question, it's running Manila from Userland as the web server/weblog product. Everything is dynamic on there, even the pictures are served out of the database, and it's basically running out of CPU horsepower in this case, Frontier.exe is using about 90% of my CPU time. :)

Re:eMac screen suXX0rs

[Golias]

However, many other people can't or won't pay more for a flat panel, and would quite happily get by with a $100 Trinitron CRT or a monitor they already have.

Step 1: Put the eMac under your desk or wherever.
Step 2: Plug the monitor you have and like into the video out plug (yes, it takes standard VGA connections).
Step 3: There's no step three.

Re:Hmmm.

[anonymous loser]

Apparently you didn't read the company story. If you did, you would realize that the original goal was to get a mac that didn't come bundled with a specific monitor, etc., so you could mix and match the system as you see fit. As stated in the linked page:

just didn't like that if I wanted a 21" monitor and wanted to purchase Apple Macintosh, I needed to put down $1699.99 regardless if all I wanted to do was surf the web, check e-mail or purchase off ebay with a larger monitor and low cost processor like in the iBook or iMac.

whats the cool case on the front page??

[cgifool]

I dont understand, the home page has a cool looking slim machine pictured, but it just says its a "concept drawing".

Then, when you go to click "purchase", it looks like any old clunky PC box.

Whats the deal?

it actually seems to be cheaper...

[vena]

CoreCrib Dual 1200 Computer for $1799.99

CoreCrib Fully Assebled System
G4 Dual 1200Mhz 2MB cache
1024MB Memory
52x CD-RW
120GB Harddrive
Geforce4MX 32MB ADC DVI and DVI-> VGA Adapter
2 Firewire, 2 USB Ports, 10/10/1000 Ethernet, Audio in/out
Front Firewire, 2xUSB and Audio OUT
Just Add keyboard, mouse, and OS
ATA, Power Cable and Fans/Heatsink are included.
Just plug in, add keyboard/mouse, boot from OS Install CD and install your OS. No hardware Installation!

you're losing .05 ghz of speed (like you'll notice) but gaining ram and hd space for $200 cheaper

Real cost comparison or The myth of low cost

[gerardrj]

Using the prices the author posts in the review, adding in $120 for Mac OS X and $50 for labor the real cost for hardware for this machine comes to $944, and that doesn't include shipping. Let's assume $5 per item and that's another $20 for a total of $964 for this "low cost Mac"

Okay, but Apple sells a spiffy new machine for $1,500. That's a difference of $536. Now the question is this:

Are the "extras" you get with the new Apple Mac worth the extra $536? Lets look at the "extras":

(numbers in parenthesis are estimated upgrade costs)
1. Support and warranty. You have someone to point the finger at with hardware failures (priceless??)
2. 200Mhz faster CPU speed ($225 assumes purchasing 1Ghz instead of 800)
3. 33Mhz?? faster bus speed (can't upgrade)
4. 2x faster memory (can't upgrade)
5. 32MB more Video RAM ( $65 more than the 7000 for the Radeon 8500)
6. GPU is about 2x more powerful
7. FireWire 800 ($100 includes USB2)
8. USB 2.0
9. Built-in AirPort antenna
10. AGP port is 2x faster (can't upgrade)
11. A better looking case

The things that can be upgraded will cost $390 to do so, and a total build-it-yourself cost of $1,356.
And this machine still doesn't perform as well as the new system will, and would cost only $140 less than the new Apple PowerMac.

I'll take the Apple eqipment for the extra $140.