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| Silent ATX G4 |
| Written by Todd Anderson | |||||||||||||||||
| Saturday, 02 September 2006 | |||||||||||||||||
A Quiet and Powerful Power Mac "Sawtooth" G4 Redo I love the older Power Mac towers and design, but I was growing weary of the noise, heat and lack of expansion options, especially for the front panel. It was time to upgrade and turn my aging G4 Sawtooth into a quiet and powerful everyday machine. My objective was to stay at, or near, the noise level of the G5 tower while upgrading the aging machine as far as possible. I also wanted the end result to have a very clean “factory” or “OEM” appearance.
 Getting Started
I started by stripping all of the existing parts from the Power Mac and getting a new case. I selected a Lian-Li PC-60 aluminum tower as the build quality is amazing and it has a removable logic board tray. My solution for mounting the logic board was to trim the original steel tray (side of the original case) and mount it on top of the new aluminum tray. This solved the PCI alignment problem and also allowed me to keep the original mounts and heatsink on the logic board tray. The heatsink is required to keep the back side chip on the logic board cool and stable. The heat is now transfered from the steel tray to the aluminum tray, and I have not needed any additional cooling even when using the machine at near 100% CPU usage for hours at a time. I used a Dremel cut-off tool to remove the required bit of the new tray so that the steel tray would fit flush with the back. I applied heatsink compound between the steel tray and the aluminum tray under the original heatsink location, and then secured the steel tray with locking washers and screws. 
On the back, I used pop-rivets to secure the card cage to the aluminum tray back which matched the original construction look. After adding a few trim pieces around the back panel connectors, I had the OEM look I desired. Due to the fact of using the original mounts, the logic board dropped right into place. I did add some Arctic Silver compound to the heatsink on the back side of the logic board to ensure proper cooling in the new case. 
Modification of the new case was the next step, as I wanted to hide as much of the new wiring as possible. This was achieved by using a hole saw just in front of the power supply to run wires to the back side of the case. Next, I installed the new front panel fan controller, media bay and optical drive with the matching aluminum bezel. I made an ATX extender cable and modified the 2 wires required using a previous mod guide, and secured the new cable to the logic board tray. This allowed me to use an off the shelf, unmodified ATX power supply that should make replacement easier in the future. MacMod provides several guides for connecting the front panel LEDs and switches, but I created my own solution. It was important to keep all of the original buttons and functional sleep ‘throbber’, so I added my own wires to the original front panel button board and mounted it on the back side of the internal drive bays. It works great, and I didn’t need to cut or splice any wires. I soldered one wire on Power, Reset, and Common. The front panel power/sleep LED was removed, and the new case high-intensity LED was soldered in using the existing wires. This solution allowed me to reuse the original flat front panel connector cable without modification. I finished the rest of the new power, fan, and temperature monitor wiring before doing any more assembly, as the case was wide open. 
The new case had two front case fans, but I only needed one fan to keep my hard drives cool, so I turned the other fan housing into a speaker mount. The original case speaker and mount were used, and were glued into a fan housing after using cutters to remove the fan and extra plastic. The new AeroCool controller has a volume control, which I am using to control the onboard sound volume. System assembly started by placing the logic board in position, attaching all the required cables and installing the new PCI cards. As the front panel media bay needed 2 USB connections, I purchased a 6 port USB 2.0 card with 4 outside ports and 2 inside ports. The internal logic board Firewire port is now being used for the front panel connector. To increase system performance and simplify drive cabling, a SATA PCI 2 port card was added. This also provided the hard drive activity signal needed for the front panel LED. The ATI video card was modified with the addition of the Arctic Cooling Silencer to move more of the hot air outside the case and reduce the overall system noise level. The CPU, memory, and hard drives were mounted last. 
Final assembly involved attaching the temperature sensors to the CPU, video card, hard drives, case and hiding every cable possible. With the addition of the drives and front panel hardware, several additional power connectors were required. This was solved by using the new ATX power supply, which has many additional power connectors and a greatly increased power capacity. 
Results The finished system is as quiet as a G5 tower. It is as fast as my iMac G5 for daily use and much faster when running games. It is fun to use and show off whenever possible, especially to PC gaming enthusiasts. The fan controller does a good job of maintaining the system temperature while keeping the fan noise to a minimum. For gaming or CPU intensive tasks, the controller can be placed into manual mode with the touch of a button which allows all fans to go to max speed. A second button returns the system to automatic mode when the playing and hard work is done. Future plans include: the installation of two red CCFL lights that were ordered but not received in time for this guide, and a custom polished aluminum heatsink/cover complete with laser cut Powerlogix logo and LEDs. 
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