Can AMD Motherboard be powered by G3 powersupply?

January 21, 2006 8:51 AM

Here's a technical question. Will this motherboard work with a G3 (Mac) power supply? Gigabyte GA-6VTXD Also in the motherboard is an AMD Athlon 900Mhz. Is that fast? What's the comparison to Intel chips? I've never really understood the conversion. I thought it would be neat to use an old, unwanted G3 case for something like this.

Also will a 900MHz AMD chip make a good Debian computer?

posted by Napierzaza to computers & internet (8 comments total)

No, it won't work with the PSU.
No, that's not fast (probably about equivilent to a 1 Ghz Pentium III)
Maybe, depends what you're doing with it.
posted by cosmonaught at 9:05 AM on January 21, 2006

I was going to make my own RAID
posted by Napierzaza at 9:07 AM on January 21, 2006

I'm a little confussed-- that seems like a dual-processor Intel board, I wouldn't think it would take an Athlon...
posted by cosmonaught at 9:22 AM on January 21, 2006

A 900 Athlon (or Pentium III or Celeron, or whatever it is you really have) should be plenty fast enough to run a fileserver with ~4 disks running a software RAID. Of course, if you have the G3 motherboard, it might be up to the task as well.
posted by Good Brain at 9:31 AM on January 21, 2006

For reference, here's the question where the project began.

If you want to turn that Mac into a file server (a computer, handing out files over NFS or Windows file sharing or something) instead of a bunch of disk controlled by another computer, and you've got the whole G3, then just use it as is. Throw Linux on, run Samba to provide access to filesystems as Windows shares, and away you go. I imagine you can do the same thing with OS X, but I haven't used it for that so I don't know the details.

And yes, that motherboard is a dual-Pentium one, it won't take AMD anything. But just like first time around: the G3 isn't a PC in a pretty case, it's a completely different computer.
posted by mendel at 9:55 AM on January 21, 2006

I'd like to recommend you take a look at some A+ Hardware books, something like this. I'm not sure you understand exactly what you're doing, and being informed will help you understand what you need to build what you want.
posted by cellphone at 11:45 AM on January 21, 2006

Just swap out the power supply for a standard ATX one, and you're set. It will fit in there. Just don't expect any of the buttons & stuff to work - you'll have to hack those in yourself. I did this years ago with a B&W G3 case, an FIC motherboard, and an Athlon 700. Everything worked just fine but it was an ugly duct taped hack.
posted by drstein at 12:54 PM on January 21, 2006

You might want to try a smaller power supply designed for a mini-ITX case.
posted by delmoi at 3:50 PM on January 21, 2006