Clone info

Here's a set of pages for those interested in Mac Clones and ATX cases.

Detail of an ATX style PC case rear panel.

Detail of the power plug of a standard ATX case.

Here are the front panels of two Mac clones on the left is a Power Computing Power Tower Pro 250 and beside it is a Motorla Starmax 3000/240. Both machines are no longer produced but can be found used for as little as $200 cdn.

Detail shots of the rear panels, note the difference in plug configurations compared to the PC ATX case.

Detail of the Tanzania Power plug, note the difference between it and the ATX plug.

The Power Tower Pro may be quite similar to the ATX power plug, though it has a case as good or better than an ATX mid tower. The Power Tower case has three internal fans! One in the power supply, one on the rear of the case and a third over the cpu.

The Power Tower Pro (ptp) is prewired for most of it's internal bays and has a dual scsi 2 bus. It has four 5.25 bays and two 3.5 bays accessable from the front as well as three hard drive bays. One is in the front stack while two are mounted sideways in the cage over the cpu. One caveat with the ptp case, this side uses normal screws for mounting, the opposite side uses a special track. However if you fill up all the bays you can use the one track which came with the cd on the bottom bay in use and stack everything else on top of eachother. The ptp also uses a cpu daughtercard which makes upgrades to as much as a G4 cpu very easy.

Changing gears, this is the Motorola starmax case. Though not as expandable as the ptp case it is still quite useable. I like it because it has IDE and SCSI built onto the mb, therefore you can install inexpensive drives and make a very useable server tower. Also handy is the fact that you do not need any special mounting rails for the drive bays unlike the Power Computing and UMAX clones. One downside is that this uses the Tanzania mb which requires special dimms which are not compatible with PC 66/100/133 or older Mac 5 volt dimms. This ram is very expensive because of this both new and used. The other disadvantage is that this motherboard has it's cpu soldered to the mb. Upgrades are possible via the L2 cache slot and right now are really cheap but I wonder if this is as good as the daughtercard method. Also of note, the 3000 series have 603e chips while the 4000 have 604 chips.

Umax/Supermatch also made a Mac clone, this one in a mini tower case.

Running a PowerPC 603 chip at 200 mhz it was moderately fast for it's time. The chip is mounted in a zif mount so you have the possibility of upgrading the cpu.

The motherboard only had two dimm slots and these are 5v and not the more common 3 volt chips!

The machine is pretty jammed packed inside but like the Power Computing machines it had a lot of space available for internal drives. The UMAX was both scsi and ide so you can turn one of these machines into a pretty dandy file server for very little money.

The designers also gave you additional spots to mount hard drives on the side of the power supply.

Some other notes, all these clones have pci slots allowing you to use Realtek PC network cards in them. I use the 10/100t cards which work extremely well and cost around $19 in Toronto currently. Hope this helps, good luck.


Though not a clone per se, this third party mini tower was a rather interesting item that was an upgrade for anyone who owned a Quadra 650.

Open the front cover and voila, lots of slots for all sorts of goodies.

Looking at the sticker on the back it seems to imply that this case will fit a PowerMac 8100 motherboard. This particular case has a IIvi motherboard mounted inside. Anyhow something you don't see around too often and it weighs a ton! The only other third party case that I have ever seen was an add on to the LC pizza box. It was a insert that sat on top of the lower chassis and had a power supply and space for addition hard drives.

This page has been visited times since April 15, 2001.