My name is GordoWas about to test the newly modified ATX PSU in my Quicksilver G4... before I realized it was missing the CMOS battery (I forgot what Apple calls this, but it's the 1/2 AA battery that lives on the mobo... whatever). Why I bought a new battery for it, then realized the PSU was going to need replacing before it would work, and then removed the brand new battery I bought is a mystery to me. Maybe I thought I'd be holding onto it long enough to worry about the battery leaking a corroding the board? (iirc it was a lithium battery though, so honestly no idea what was going thru my head... or where I stored it in the meantime lmao)
Going to try anyway... I have a whole pile of 3.7v batteries from "disposable" vapes, so why the hell not?
I don't have the system drive that came with it anymore (well I do, but I repurposed it for something... I think it's currently living in my modded PS2), so I popped in a random IDE drive I had lying around, and I'm going to try booting into 9.2.2 via USB using the OS9 Boot Kit from Macintosh Repository. The last time this G4 ran, that's what I used, so assuming this does in fact work, and I haven't wired it incorrectly (I have confirmed that nothing is going anywhere that it's going to cause damage, so the worst case scenario is that a wire is missing, not something like +12V going into a +5V rail), then there's no reason I shouldn't be able to boot OS9 from USB again.
Don't judge the soldering too harshly. I only have two hands, and no good helping hands or other work holding apparatus lol. The joints are good, but there was a lot of twisting to keep things together, so everything just looks like a massive glob of solder. Those 100V diodes have pretty massive terminals that are not nearly as flexible as the wires lol
Anyway, gonna go take a shower. So if I have made some obvious terrible mistake, hopefully somebody points it out before I get back and apply power.
I almost made a very dumb mistake initially. This power supply has a second 4-pin connector that latches onto the P4, I guess for motherboards/chipsets that require 8-pin power?? I don't actually know. I bought this for a build with an LGA1150, when 2011v3 was already the new hotness, so maybe some higher end chips on that platform required it?
Anyway, I swapped the polarity on one of them, but without even thinking, I initially plugged in the other non-swapped connector. Of course that also means that the wires I cut and soldered (removing the pins without the correct tool is do-able, but also a huge PiTA, so I decided for the P4 power to just snip the wires) are going into an incorrectly keyed connector 🙄. I could've just done the same thing again to the other, but it was nothing a sharp knife couldn't correct lol. I also know from experience that the keying is easily bypassed with muscle+stupidity (a much younger me once managed to plug a 4-pin molex into an IDE drive upside down), but that feels a little too barbarian for what was for a long time, my "beige whale" (however uncharacteristically un-beige for the time period it was).