I thought I'd share a little weekend project here. I picked up a "dead" Digital Audio tower and below are some steps I took to restore and upgrade it using extra parts I had. It was in pretty sad condition when I got it. I'm a little curious about its history because judging by the dust accumulation it saw LOTS of use. The logic board has a bunch of damage in different places from being worked on. I don't know if it was dead before this. The power supply was also dead, so perhaps that died first and inspired someone to get out their tools. This kind of thing first caught my eye:
-first step: initial tear-down, cleanup and recap of the power supply--lots of bad caps. Clear out the bunnies, wash everything and oil the fans. Add a beefy 5v molex connector to the power supply for potential RAID setup using 2.5" laptop drives, and add a 12v connector for a Quicksilver logic board.
-next, swap out the damaged logic board with one from a Quicksilver. The later "B" version readily accepts IDE disks larger than 128GB--a nice little bonus. An SSD would be faster, but I had this nice drive looking for a home.
-upgrade the CPU; swap the 7455 chips on a cooked dual apple Quicksilver board with 7448 chips. Fix the apple firmware and de-restrict the OS X kernel.
-upgrade the GPU; solder on a larger EEPROM, flash an ATI Radeon X800XTPE with a Mac ROM and add a decent cooler. Change out a molex connector so it can fit and power the card.
-install software, setup RAID and network shares, backup files, play games, watch movies, etc.
-first step: initial tear-down, cleanup and recap of the power supply--lots of bad caps. Clear out the bunnies, wash everything and oil the fans. Add a beefy 5v molex connector to the power supply for potential RAID setup using 2.5" laptop drives, and add a 12v connector for a Quicksilver logic board.
-next, swap out the damaged logic board with one from a Quicksilver. The later "B" version readily accepts IDE disks larger than 128GB--a nice little bonus. An SSD would be faster, but I had this nice drive looking for a home.
-upgrade the CPU; swap the 7455 chips on a cooked dual apple Quicksilver board with 7448 chips. Fix the apple firmware and de-restrict the OS X kernel.
-upgrade the GPU; solder on a larger EEPROM, flash an ATI Radeon X800XTPE with a Mac ROM and add a decent cooler. Change out a molex connector so it can fit and power the card.
-install software, setup RAID and network shares, backup files, play games, watch movies, etc.
Last edited:
