The G4 Powermac case, while looking pretty good, did not measure up in terms of:
- Air flow (especially given the position of the PSU in relation to the CPU)
- Noise - poor airflow means fans run louder
- Expandability - the door would not close with the Fatal1ty 7600 GT installed
The ECS 945GZT-M was also not without issue. The main ones being poor overclocking capabilities that meant I could not take the E4300 any higher than 2.16GHz. This meant a new parts list for a mostly new build:
- Intel D975XBX2 motherboard
- Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad
- XFX Fatal1ty Geforce 7600GT
- Zalman ZM500 Heatpipe cooled 500W PSU
- 4 x OCZ Platinum 1GB 800MHz DDR2
- 2 x 160GB SATA II and 2 x 500GB SATA II
- Icydock SATA pluggable backplane
- Gigabyte Aurora 3D case
- Zalman CNPS8000 low profile CPU cooler
- NEC DVD-RW ND-3540A (Superdrive enabled via Patchburn)
I picked up the BadAxe 2 motherboard on ebay for almost half the going rate (must have been my lucky day). Reusing my old E4300 saved some money too.
I liked the idea of a pluggable drive solution as the thing about Hackintosh is it is not without risk (particularly as this time I planned to make use of the new EFI emulation doing the rounds. Having multiple system drives allows me to keep a cloned bootable copy in the event of an experiment going awry!
