Mac Pro guts in Lian Li case.

N

natermeister

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 26, 2005
Messages
463
First off, I already know this isn't cost effective, so you can spare me that. I'm just wanting to do something different that I don't believe has been done before. Also, I don't want to do any OSX86 garbage. I've tried it, it barely functions. Don't even bring that up.

I'm looking at buying a workstation next year when the dust from Nehalem has settled out. Primary use of said workstation will be for photo editing and batch conversion foremost, but also video and audio work.

The Mac Pro seems like a pretty good option. It can run both OSX and Windows (64-bit Vista is going to be necessary for Photoshop CS4 work) and OSX allows me Aperture and Final Cut. It's not too spendy as long as you don't let Apple rape you by adding extra memory and drives from the factory.

The only real problem I have with it is the case. Two 5.25" drive bays and four 3.5" bays simply isn't enough for a high-end workstation. I could probably get away with the 5.25" bays but I need more hard drive space. I don't want a sidecar NAS because they're pretty slow. Also the Lian Li case would allow me to water cool it for near silence (not going to even bother trying to overclock a Mac, utility or no utility).

The idea is to take the Mac Pro and swap the guts into a Lian Li PC-A20. This is probably the best mid-tower case I've yet seen (although it's quite pricey). One of the obvious problems are the memory riser cards. I've worked in metal fab before so I could probably make some sort of retention scheme for them, and if I couldn't, I have a friend who could probably TIG paper if he had to. He definitely could make something in that regard.

The other problem is the power supply. I'm not sure how proprietary it is. If it's simply a proprietary form-factor, no big deal. If it has various proprietary connectors, that could be more of a problem. Even then, I'm sure someone like Tyco or Molex probably makes the needed connectors and I could retrofit them into a standard ATX power supply without too much difficulty.

The biggest hurdle I've found so far is lack of technical specs. Machintologists aren't known for their love of hardware. Poking around Mac forums shows as much, these people don't know a GPU from a CPU half the time and think GPU power is a function of how big the frame buffer is. They're not going to be much help.

macproinside.jpg

Mac Pro internals


a20d03.jpg

Lian Li PC-A20 side view
 
Well, I'd assume you'd automatically void any warranty by doing this, plus I don't really see the incentive. If you've taken a close look at the internals you'd see that everything inside isn't going anywhere easily.

Basically, not doubting your craftsmanship or anything but if you're trying to put something together that's better than how the Mac Pro has been assembled I think you'll end up falling short. However, if it's really a necessity for you then go for it.
 
Good luck making a new retention plate for the waterblock to cool those cpu's, i doubt it's standard lga775 mounts, and of course as mentioned already, voiding the warranty instantly.

Does the MacPro even have more SATA ports to accomodate extra drives without an add-in card anyway?

And umm, have you heard one of the new MacPro's? My Cisco teacher has an octo-core one, with an X1950 and 8GB RAM, with 4 750 HDD's (upgraded himself to save money of course), and it's quieter than my PC (which I built totally with silence in mind).
 
I wondered about the heatsink retention, but I believe that's a standard that OEMs don't modify. Obviously it wouldn't be an LGA775 mount, but an LGA771 mount. Considering I've seen more than a few watercooled Skulltrails...that's not a big deal. Unless Apple had intel change it for some unknown reason. I don't see any specific reason why they'd be different. The SATA port count doesn't matter, I'll be using a RAID HBA from Areca.

As far as I can tell the motherboard is no different from any other E-ATX 5400 board short of the DIMM risers. It's installed reverse ATX style in the Pro case, that's about the only thing that seems odd there.

I'm not worried about the warranty.
 
There is a picture of a Mac Pro's heatsink removed in an Arstechnica article, and it looks like standard LGA 771 retention. You might need really short optical drives and/or very low-profile waterblocks, though, with the processors being at the front edge of the board.
 
I don't want to go into too much detail talking about OSx86, but, in simple terms, because of the hardware similarities now, some setups are basically identical to the Mac Pro, and as a result, run near perfectly.

Anyway, do you have a desperate need to put the Mac Pro into a PC case, or is it just a mod idea? If you take a look here at Powermax: http://www.powermax.com/articles . Click on the archived articles (bottom of page) and look at the 'Mac Pro taken apart' one. Plenty of pics there.

From the pics, it definitely seems to be a standard 771 mount.
 
TheGardenTool said:
My understanding is that Skulltrail uses LGA775 mounting for HSF.
Click to expand...

Yup, but they do make waterblocks for 604/771 mounting.

Why not get a real 5400 series motherboard instead of using the gimped mac pro board?
 
Quite honestly the MP mobo has all I need. I need room for a GPU and a RAID HBA. My sound interfaces will be FireWire, so no need for a PCI slot (although if MAudio ever puts out it's high-end cards in PCIe, that would be nice).

I'm not desperate to put it into a different case, but it would be a challenging and cool thing to do. How many times have you seen it done? I know I haven't. Not to mention the additional space would be quite useful. I just don't consider four 3.5" drive bays to be enough and I've grown quite fond of my 5-drive hot swap enclosure.
 
The Asus Z7S use the std LGA771 (Xeon) mounting holes. Plus it has some nice overclocking features...

Luv your idea though, I have the A20 case, and it is a decent box :)
 
Yeah, it's about the best optioned mid-tower I've ever seen. A lot like my PC-V1100 but with a lot more room.
 
I see the reason for wanting a larger case. Even though the MacPro case is very nice, it only has room for four drives. With a good raid controller, the drive count can be as many as the controller/case/psu can handle. I need a case that can hold more than four drives but with a smaller footprint than a rack-mount server. I'm looking at the CoolerMaster Stacker case.
 
My big concern would be getting all of the fans rewired so the system reconizes them correclty in the new case. If not the system is going to get pissed off and run the remaining fans at a much higher speed. Haven't had to repair a mac pro but the g5 towers would sound like they were about to take off if you did this.

Anyway converting that to a pc case is going to be a shit load of work with limited results. Instead of using a nas I would look at either estata or sas running to a box for drives. Hell you could use an sas controller and hd enclosure and still hook sata drives to it. Areca has good support for 10.5 from my understanding and external sas enclosures are a few hundred bucks.

I mean for exclosures you have things like theses

http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_cables_enclosures/sas4bay.asp
http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_cables_enclosures/sas8bay.asp

http://www.directron.com/e4msb.html

You could then mod one of those to look like whatever you wanted or if you really wanted to just get some sas backplanes and make you own with a case of your choice. Running the drives in a sas enclosure will give you the same speed as if they were internal.

I should mention you have a bunch of options in esata as well but I don't know what options for estata are out their. I do know Areca has some esata cards with mac os support though.

Edit:
If you only need 1 optical drive(or should I say if you can get away with it) you can do this.

http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_id=158

Hell you could put an optical drive on your desk via firewire or usb2 and get 8 internal drives.
 
I would like to keep it all in one case. Speed isn't really the issue. Honestly, I just don't want to see a MacPro tower with a box of drives sitting by it, when I know there is a way to get everything in one case. An external box will need to be powered separately. The new box will need fans in it too, so there will be more noise. It will also take up even more space. Moving a MacPro to a larger case will not be a cakewalk, but I'm sure it can be done.
 
Frenchc said:
I would like to keep it all in one case. Speed isn't really the issue. Honestly, I just don't want to see a MacPro tower with a box of drives sitting by it, when I know there is a way to get everything in one case. An external box will need to be powered separately. The new box will need fans in it too, so there will be more noise. It will also take up even more space. Moving a MacPro to a larger case will not be a cakewalk, but I'm sure it can be done.
Click to expand...

You can get a Ferrari to fit into a Mini Cooper, but it's not a logical thing to do. I just don't understand the reasoning. To each man his own I guess...
 
My big concern would be getting all of the fans rewired so the system reconizes them correclty in the new case. If not the system is going to get pissed off and run the remaining fans at a much higher speed. Haven't had to repair a mac pro but the g5 towers would sound like they were about to take off if you did this.
Click to expand...

I wasn't actually planning on using the fans from the Mac Pro. I was going to get some Yate Loon Mediums and run them at 7v. The only problem with that approach is if the Mac Pro's firmware (don't know what else to call EFI) keeps tabs on fan speeds instead of just temperatures (it probably does). That might cause problems, not necessarily with noise but elsewhere.

I'm just trying to think of all the various things that could slow me up or put the kebosh and the whole thing. So far there isn't anything I couldn't deal with, so far.
 
I'm worried about the IO panels and airflow in a normal system.

IMHO you can go further if you get a cheap Mac Pro for FCP/Aperture and a eked out C2D E8400/8600 @4Ghz. Photoshop does not scale 2+ threads so raw clock speed counts. Plus RAM is several magnitudes cheaper.

Asset share could take advantage of Gigabit LAN, hopefully fast enough.
 
Holybonkers, more like taking a Mini Cooper and fitting it into a semi. A very logical thing to do if you wanted a mac file server with a smaller footprint and less expensive than say 3 Xserves. The Xserve is a monster, and I don't really need anything THAT big or expensive. However, I would like more drives than the MacPro allows. I don't see why it wouldn't work.
 
What's really interesting about this is that I had the exact same idea (for different purposes). I basically wanted use this very case to have one super complete system. Essentially I wanted to transfer my Media Duplication / Video Production station from my A10 to this case, because of its E-ATX compatability. Having that, it would allow me to implement a Mac Pro Logic motherboard in this system (can be bought for about $500). I've always seen people putting a PC motherboard inside a Mac Pro Chassis, but never the other way around.

After following forums on how to build a Mac Pro from scratch and keeping up with blogs and threads, I knew what issues would entail to pursuing this project, to list a few:

1) I/O Panel (will it fit properly? seems to be the same form factor as an Intel E-ATX server board)
2) Power Supply (the Mac Pro motherboard seeems to be picky with the PSU, though I've read there may be converter cables to connect with E-ATX(?) ...not sure)
3) Cabling (Proprietary Apple stuff)
4) Fans (already mentioned above, EFI plays a big role in this)
5) Soft end: Keeping everything legit, updating the system. It's certainly voiding warranty, but of course we knew that already before thinking about this project. I would already have OS X purchased to install, it's the EFI firmwares that gets tricky.

*Essentially the propriteries

This person managed to fit a mac pro (prototype) board in a pc case (a not-so-attractive one):
http://flickr.com/photos/sonnyhung/2242933295/in/photostream/
^ additional photos in the stream

TO really break this down, WHY? Because I want to be able to have everything all together as one, A Powerful Mac Pro Video Production system with the capabilities to of being a Backup Server and Media Duplication System. (Sans External CD/DVD Duplicators, sans External )

Features 15 Drives of plenty with my 1 primary SAS drive along with my SAS Controller to take on 7 SATA Optical Drive and 7 SATA Hard Drives, 15 drives in total, this chassis will be completely packed with sufficient airflow. Whats nice about what I want to do is that, all drives work out of the box. Both opticals and hard disks are compatible with Apple, and are detected right away.

Other stuff probably not as important, and not worth mentioning since they'll work with out any problems:
- Substantial Memory for now, 16gb ram
- NVIDIA OEM Quadro FX5600 Graphics
- ATTO ExpressSAS RAID Controller
- RME HDSPe MADI


Is it worth it? It'd be an interesting project, it will get pricey, but I think I wouldn't do it. Something to consider, it's certainly nice to have everything in one. I would probably spend as much purchasing a chassis for 7-8 Hard Drives and another external chassis for 7x1 Optical Drives.

Another thing is, if I do take apart my Mac Pro, I can sell the chassis for around $300-$400, that can go towards the case...


* apologies for bringing back an old thread on top :\ (i've had experience of people getting weird about these things)
 
Actually, I think the size of the Mac Pro "logic board" is longer than the E-ATX form factor, somewhere around 16" I believe.

Another thing to note, the 2x CPU socks of the motherboard would hit the middle card aligner of the chassis specifically. Then again, the size wouldn't even fit in the motherboard tray anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_computer_form_factors

22754864533f20579c18bwn5.jpg



UPDATE: Approximate Dimensions measured by a fellow peer: 15" x 10.5" x 7" (memory risers) L x W x H

So i guess this project is a no-go for me :\ case modding is always an option, not worth is for this situation in my opinion
 
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