My name is Stephen Barta and I am one of the Mac Tech's for the University of Arizona, I am also a student here. Just recently I decided to put my know how and knowledge to the test about my mac. I have a Quicksilver G4 733, w 768MB RAM, ATA-133 IDE card, GeForce3, two 120GB hard drives, two 40GB hard drives, an upgraded DVD-CDR/RW drive (LG GCC-4808B) and a Zip 250. I had all of this within a quicksilver tower and well as everyone knows that sucker is loud to begin with. (see the Systems page G4 macs section for several articles on QS model noise reduction posted back in 2001-Mike)

With all my goodies in the tower it was heating up quite a bit so it was even noisier then before. Well I was looking around one of my favorite websites, Computergeeks.com, mainly because they have some great deals. Well I came across what I thought was an awesome case. It was completely clear and made out of Acrylic. I remember hearing some stories about someone who had swapped their G4 into an ATX and all it really required was repositioning the board mounts. (See systems page for past articles on Mac to ATX case conversions for several mac models.)

So I bought the case and the nice thing about acrylic is it is very forgiving. All I had to do was line up the baord to the PCI slots drill a couple new mounting holes and reuse the mounts that came with the tower (brass pegs screwed into the acrylic). And I had my mod.

My G4 now has 4 internal hard drives, 2 optical drives, the zip 250, 768 MB RAM, and I pulled the airport antennas out and my airport works even better in this case. The two 40GB drives are setup as a raid stripe and running Virtual PC. I am a business major so I have to run some Win specific apps... blah.

The main reason for the case swap is that I needed the extra space and with adding in my own fans it is soo much quieter. Because of the power supply I knew could it could only handle so much equipment. I took apart one of my external firewire cases and pulled the 80w power supply out of it. Not much, yes I know, but its enough to run 5 Antec fans, and a small lighting system. I thought what better way to show off the acrylic case then to have a nice blue lighting system.

(I asked him about the case's shielding (unless it has some clear conductive coating) and he replied)

As far as the coating goes I don't believe there is any but I haven't noticed any kind of interference with it... I love my tower and hope to do a processor upgrade soon to a dual G4 1.42 GHz chips.
Sincerely, Stephen Barta