fixing G4 gigabit

hey, looking to get a dual 450 gigabit working and i need a power supply. i see i can mod an atx one and make it work, and i also see plenty of 22 pin supplys on ebay and the net in general, what im worried about is it seems these supplies die A LOT. so im not sure if i should just mod an atx one, or go after a real mccoy? i typically leave my computers on 24/7 so id rather not have to worry about the supply.

as i mentioned in another post im extreamly new to mac and took on this project to learn from it. moding a power supply is easy for me, but i dont know how much i trust the lack of 28v?

also on a dual 450, should i aim for tiger or leopard? machine will be used for internet mainly, email, messaging. and will probably end up with 1.5 to 2Gb of ram and a decent video card, probably in the 128-256mb range. i have a few laying around that i beleive can work. look foward to any comments and tips. thanks
oh and forgot to mention, i will not be powering an apple monitor with it. but im not sure if thats the only thing the 28v is used for?

just got the machine running, modified an old antec 330W supply. everyting works except it wont sleep, it simply crashes unfortunately.

tho i am surprised how fast tiger runs on it compared to the G4 400 yikes.

Shame about that sleeping, but you can avoid that. The Gigabit Ethernet machines are much faster than Yikes! especially the DP. The AGP2X graphics are much faster than PCI cards as AGP slots are 66v and PCI 33v.

Keep you eye peeled for a replacement PS on eBay etc as they do come up regularly.

Tiger will fly on the DP, particularly if you have a minimum of 1GB memory. Leopard is designed to run only on machines over 867MHz processors, and even a 450MHz DP is still only 450MHz and not 900MHz so stay with Tiger.

This from Apple may assist:-

Power Mac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet): Power Supply Voltage Test

The Sleeping issue is due to Apple using a 28-Volt rail for the switching voltage instead of 5 VDC like all PC's use. Some have made a voltage doubler to up the 5 Volt SB up a bit, but on my G4 Digital Audio, if I let it sleep it just turns off even with around 15 VDC. I just set OSX to never sleep and all is fine for now, but I am going to do some experimenting and will get back to you if I find a way around it.

reason i decided not to buy an orignal supply is it seems like they burn out often. id rather not spend $80+ on one thats just going to fail.

i did find another problem i beleive is related to the sleep problem. if i turn the computer off by shutting down and just letting it sit for awhile it trips the overload in the power supply. i assume from drawing too much current from the 5v standby line. barely a problem for me since my machines run nonstop anyway. tho if i want to shutdown i just reach around the back and flip the rocker on the supply.

the supplys 5v standby line is rated 2A which the highest i saw was 3A on newer supplies and i doubt is going to fix either problem.

either way, im happy. i ended up with a working gigabit dual 450 for 100% free.

P.S. thanks dtravis7. it was your posts that helped me out with the mod.

now running leopard no problems so far. dvd player even works

havent botherd to try timemachine

my first mac and it was 100% free in the end. just took a lot of learning to make it happen