|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
Servicing a Power Mac G5 Quad LCS - An A-Z Guide
Summary: The Achilles heel of most late 2005 Power Mac G5 Quads is the Liquid Cooling System (LCS). When it starts to fail, your G5 Quad will run louder and hotter and eventually will cease to operate entirely. This blog post concerns itself with servicing that LCS, so that your Quad remains a productive member of your computing team. Post Body: Long time readers of either this blog or my "Quadras, Cubes and G5s" blog may remember that I have been working on and off for quite some time to get a late 2005 Power Mac G5 Quad back into thermal normality - it has been running hot and loud for quite some time.
Over the last two months (yup, two months!) I have been working on servicing this machine and getting it back to where it should be. The Achilles heel of most late 2005 Power Mac G5 Quads is the Liquid Cooling System (LCS). The PowerPC 970MP that lies at the heart of the G5 Quad is a beast, and that beast throws off a lot of heat. To keep the chip running comfortably cool, Apple equipped the G5 Quad with a Liquid Cooling System (shown below).
When the LCS is new it is very effective, but over time (and it is over 20 years now since the last G5 Quad rolled off the production line) its cooling ability tends to degrade due to a variety of factors: build up of crystals/debris in the coolant, micro evaporation of said coolant, leaks in the cooling loop and so on. The Quad ramps up its fans to compensate and the machine gets louder and louder. Eventually, even at full fan RPMs, the machine starts to run hotter and hotter, and eventually in the worst case, simply halts due to CPU overheat. When your Quad starts to get noisy, it is time to service the LCS, a daunting task that is not for the faint of heart. It has taken me two months of concentrated work to get my Quad back to the thermal target range. To help you do the same but in a shorter period of time, I have documented my procedure for LCS servicing. It is my fond hope that this is a comprehensive A-Z guide to that servicing. This is a large guide (58 pages!) but it makes liberal use of images and photos, pushing up both the page count and the file size (66.8 MB for the PDF, 15.8 MB for the Word version). The guide can be viewed/downloaded from: Power Mac G5 Quad LCS Restoration, A-Z Guide, v1.0.pdf The original Word document is in the same place - just change the ".pdf" at the end of the URL to ".docx". Comments and feedback MOST welcome! Just click the Comment button and go from there. |
 |
 |
