[quangdiggity]

Hey, i'm no "genius" at modification, so i have a few q's that may be,, hhmmm, well make me seem like an ignoramuse.

1) can a mac be built from scratch... as u could do with PC's- eg buy a processor, RAM, graphics, motherboard etccc

2)How far can you go in upgrading ur mac without risking to damage sumthing.... i mean harddisk, graphics, disk drives---- especially on the following macs: eMac (newewst/last), iMac Core Duo, and Macbook ??

3) could i take out the Ati Radeon 9600 64 MB from my eMAc and put it into a MAcbook (i think its a better card then the GMA950)
4) could i buy a better graphics card for the iMac, and move the Ati X1600 to the eMAc and the Ati 9600 to a emac 1GHZ ??

TIA

[Waragainstsleep]

I'm afraid the answer to most of your questions is no.

The eMac and MacBook have their graphics 'cards' integrated into their mainboards. You cannot swap them around without the aid of an SMT machine or some extraordinary soldering skills. And even then you would be restricted to swapping in identical or very similar components, since they would have to be pin compatible.

As for drives, you can swap those until you're blue in the face if you like. You won't damage anything as long as you are careful (don't touch unshielded electrical components unless you are grounded. Especially RAM, but all other chips and PCBs too).

To build a Mac from scratch, you can do this, but you must either start with the logic board from an existing Mac (some Apple CPUs can be swapped, it depends on model) or build an Intel based Mac and run a dodgy OS on it.

Don't try and fit CPUs, PSUs or graphics cards to a Mac board unless you know they will work.

Disc/disk drives are usually OK (some burners are not supported) and RAM will usually be fine if it is the right specs.

Hope that helps.

War

[quangdiggity]

aaah, ok.
i was expecting similar answers

[zenithproduct]

You can do some upgrades tho.. Upgrade the ram to the upper limits, biggest fastest hard drive you can get away with. Faster cd drives, overclock the CPU a bit higher if you can't just grab a faster logic board.
Take my iMac for example.. It was a blueberry 350... Now it's got a 500MHz logic board, I'll probably overclock it to 600 shortly. (600MHz logic boards are available, but cost twice as much on Ebay, so I stuck with 500 for now). 1GHz of ram is the limit, so that's what it's got. I can swap a superdrive in place of the old and tired 24x CD-rom drive. That's on my to-do list. The hard drive is a 120gb 7200rpm with 8meg cache. Biggest and fastest I can get for this computer (internally, at least, there's always firewire external....)
I love this machine, I've always liked the look and style of the iMac's.. I could actually send the board off to have a G4 soldered in place of the G3 on the logic board, but I really don't want to be without my baby for that long.