hey how hard would it be to build a power mac g3 or g4 and would it be more expensive than buying it made already, so  p[lease just say what they think and maybe a list of parts or something that wouldd need to get?

thanks for ur time

rob

You can't build your own guts.  The closest you could get to building your own is putting the guts (mobo, cpu etc.) of a powermac in a different case.  you could buy a mobo with cpu and psu on ebay and throw it into an ATX case.

Hope this helps..

you could probably find a complete system pretty cheap in ebay, cheaper than buying the mobo, case, etc and then having to pay delivery of several parts....

I built my own B&W G3 from parts purchased on eBay. It was a while ago though, and still probably ended up costing me more than a whole one would have. The go very cheaply on eBay these days though.

yeh thats what i want to do get all the parts and build it , like off normal parts that  can find on ebay or websites , i just want to build something , coz it will be fun.

I'm a big skeptic when it comes to used Mac pricing. When people say cheap, make sure they don't mean cheap in comparison to what the computer cost when it was new or what a new one would cost and is in fact just generally inexpensive. People are still trying to get $1000+ for PowerMac G4s, which is really sad. Sure, we Mac users that bought new systems had to pay a lot, but that's no reason to gouge people buying your now-used and most likely old computer.

That reminds me... I need to try and gouge people by selling an old iMac. Muwa ha ha ha!

I was just watching a Titanium 867 going for over £450. Thats a ludicrous price.

I agree with most of the posts.  Buying a Mac is most always cheaper.  I bought a GE for 75 bucks a couple of months ago and earlier this year bought a DA for 225 bucks.  Mother boards that are actually good cost so much that not buying the complete mac is foolish.  Plus you will know that all of the parts really work!

It's entirely possible, and there are so many different paths to the same goal.  I think it depends on your budget and how much work you want to put into it.  Here are a few scenarios to think about:

1.  You can just buy a Powermac G4 from ebay, even one with an older processor, then spend more buy purchasing a CPU upgrade on ebay, and ebay store or elsewhere.  You can also purchase upgrade parts from ebay as well.  After installing all those upgrades, now you can purchase another Mac and put those parts from the old Mac into the 2nd purchased one.

2.  Purchase a Mac from ebay that has a broken or missing part (power supply, processor), then purchase the broken or missing part separately from another auction.  Some sellers may want to sell the whole machine at a cheap price because they don't know how to troubleshoot it or don't want to take the time to have it fixed professionally.  This works out for you, the educated mac technician, since you would possibly know if it's a simple fix that wouldn't require purchasing any parts or maybe just replacing a cheap part (Bad RAM stick).

This is a sticky situation though, because you have to determine which mac requires the cheapest parts replaced.  You can check out an iMac that has everything working except a broken speaker, and another one that has everything working except the monitor itself.  Without seeing the two in person or asking questions, my guess is that the one with the non-working monitor would cost more to get fixed.

3.  You could start from scratch and purchase a bare case with just the power supply, then add on from there.  The downside is that you'd have to research the parts beforehand to ensure that they would work with the case and/or other peripherals that you'd be purchasing.  On the plus though, whatever parts that wouldn't work can be saved for yet another project or sold back onto ebay.  Personlly I like to save them as a backup in case the other part fails, but if I see a good track record with the part then i'll save em for other projects.  It's true that this might cost more in the long run, but if you've got someone locally that's going to give you a broken PMac or if you can talk someone into giving you theirs, I say go for it.

While we'e on the subject of this, maybe someone can tell me/us the pros and cons of buying Mac laptop parts from ebay.  F'rinstance, what's the least amount of parts a broken laptop should have in working condition, whereas the replacement parts would be cheap to replace?