Pc Parts In A Mac

[Storm]

i bet im gonna get shouted @ for asking this......

we've recently gotten a mac at our school that we can open up........ curious as i am i did just that.......

now i was looking into it, and i noticed that some parts didnt look to much diffrent from a PC..... especially the RAM and HDD.........

is this correct? and are there more parts in a mac you can exchange with you PC???? cause i allways thought they were totally diffrent........

[Marius24]

i would have thought that they would be the same. Hard drive processor etc just all squeezed into a little box

[3RA1N1AC]

hard drives, yes. cd/dvd-roms, mostly. RAM... Macs tend to be highly sensitive about which brands & models of RAM you use, even if they meet the same specifications as PC RAM. overall, Macs are very strict about what parts you can use in them, while Windows is not as picky.

some 3D graphics cards advertised as Windows parts can be flashed with a new BIOS and used in a Mac, and vice versa. but you really need to do some research and find out if you have a Windows card that can be used in a Mac. it's not even a matter of "all Geforce 4s or all Radeon 8500s can be used in Macs"... it's more like certain brands, using certain types and amounts of video memory, etc.

i have a Mac IDE card in my PC, actually... it just needed to be flashed with a different BIOS. luck like that is rare, though.

CPUs and motherboards... absolutely not. completely different designs.

if you succeed in using Windows-specific parts in a Mac, you're basically hacking it... 'cause Macs are intended to be a closed system that only uses parts supplied or approved by Apple.