|
Introduction
You walk along the aisles at the LAN party you're attending and see everyone's heavily-modded cases. Quite a few people these days take to drilling holes in their cases to attach handlebars for easy transportation. CaseAce even makes a support system to attach a canvas griphandle so that you can carry all your gear around. Some people are even trying out gaming on a laptop so as to achieve good portability.
The laptop idea offers excellent portability, but at the sacrifice of computing power. Alternatively, you could install handles in your case, but I'm of the opinion that they ruin the aesthetics of the chassis. You can paint and mod your case all day long, but a couple of industrial-strength bars sticking out of it won't make it any prettier.
Then, after having read a few issues of MacAddict about making Windows to be Mac-friendly, the idea dawned on me. More and more Mac hardware these days is PC compatible...Macs even use PCI cards and ATA drives these days. A little bit of investigation into the matter proved to be more promising...
The Macintosh G4 chassis is, more or less, of microATX formfactor, and can accommodate a standard ATX power supply. It has a drop-down tray which houses the motherboard and add-on cards, and it can be easily accessed by pulling on the side-handle, making the system a dream to work on. The side-handle can also be fixed with a lockable lever, preventing anyone from opening the system and screwing around. Last, but most definitely not least, the system has a set of really strong handles that are not only functional, but very stylish as well.
The Chassis
We begin with a look into and around the chassis. Unfortunately, the chassis didn't come with the drive bezels, so I had to obtain those separately.
The victim... |
"I have no floppy drive." "Aaaghh!" |
Open sesame! |
This shows the chassis in its full glory |
This plastic mat is part of the door-locking mechanism |
The G4 chassis from the rear-view. This walkthrough was brought to you by Mt. Dew Code Red |
The G4 chassis has a built-in cooling fan for the PCI cards |
"Notice the neatly-tucked cables |
In these pictures you can see some of the excellent features and forethought that Apple put into the manufacturing of this case. While it may be manufactured for another type of motherboard, the features will still be useful when we have our brand new motherboard in here.
>> The Motherboard
|
