Mac Build 2011- Day 6- Trying different motherboard and PSU positions

The biggest decision in the case mod is deciding where to mount the power supply. There were 3 possibilities I would consider.

• Mounting the PSU in the top- the issue here is if there’s enough height between the shelf and the top of the case and finding a new home for the hard drives.
• Mounting it in the bottom at the front- this would require making some kind of mount / way of attaching it to the bottom of the case since there are only 4 holes in the bottom of the case. I would also need to make a cable to reach from the power plug in the back of the case to the power supply itself.
• Removing the PSU from the case and putting it inside the Mac PSU case- this seemed to be a tidy solution, albeit the most dangerous. As soon as you open up the case of your PSU the warranty is void and so I didn’t want to do this and the find out it wouldn’t fit inside the Mac PSU case. I could then reuse the existing Mac plug connector on the back of the case.

Another issue is the size of the motherboard tray. The ATX tray I have is quite wide (from the front to the back of the case) so moving it up or down may not be that easy if it hits the optical drive for example.
In the end I decided I would mount the power supply in the top as it seemed the best use of space, leaving a large space in the case for hard drives.


At some point I got the motherboard tray cut. There were a good 5cm after the last set of holes I needed to mount it to the case and removing this area would mean I could possibly mount the motherboard tray up high in the case and not hit the optical drive. I got this cut courtesy of the main workshop in the Queen’s Building of the Faculty of Engineering.