“I hate to let go, so soon”, That’s what I think every time I look at my Mac Pro 3,1. It was a brilliant machine, and I got to use it for a couple of years. When I made the decision to move on to a hackintosh, I also told myself that I did be taking as much of the parts I could from the Mac Pro, and adding them to the hackintosh build.
I started with checking if the fans within the fan assembly, and the single exhaust fan that the Mac Pro 3,1 ships with could be used for the custom build. I even went ahead, and figured out how to take out the fans from the fan assembly in the Mac Pro 3,1. But, the Delta fans (which are some of the best case cooling fans available in the market, some with a CFM of 150-250) were custom ordered by Apple, and do not have the PWN wire, like the current case fans do. They are a bit old school. The delta fans in the Mac Pro 3,1 are controlled by the amount of voltage supplied - between 0-5V. I could either create a small circuit, or use a wire off a SATA connector to use them. But since, I do not have the time or the skills to pull something like off without guaranteeing the safety of the new build, I decide against using them.
Mac Pro 3,1 - Delta fans from the front fan assembly
Then I went around researching, and reading on various forums if I could use the two GT120s from the Mac Pro - which were purchased from MacVidCards.com , into the new hackintosh build. I wanted to know if they would work OOTB. And sure as hell those two do. They work right out of the box, alongside Intel’s iGPU HD4600. Not that they work flawlessly. I had to install NVidia’s Web Drivers, and CUDA drivers to get them to behave a little more nicely. Apart from that both of them somehow affect the sleep / wake cycle of the new hackintosh build. Which I am okay with, because I plan to be running the hackintosh machine 24/7. When I don’t need it to be switched on, I will be just powering it down.
The data disks, (HDDs + SSD) were shifted over. The SSD did prove to be a problem, but that’s been fixed. You can read about that here.
Apart from the above three, I don’t think I can use anything else in the new build. So I will be stripping it’s parts, and putting them up for sale on eBay.
I am holding on to the MP 3,1 case for a couple of weekend projects of sorts. More on them as soon as I finish with removing all the parts, and setting this new hackintosh machine up. Building the machine from the ground up gave me a much needed push to acquire a RPi. I will be using RPi for a robotics project I’ve been sitting on, for quiet a few years now. I think it’s time to get started on that too.
A detailed post about what issues I faced, and how I tackled those with respect to this new hackintosh build is in the works, and will be online soon here, with plenty of photos to go with it.
