What's equally as remarkable is that you would think after all that, the G5 would have been whisper-quiet. Oops…
Yeah, not only "noisy" but some of them were liquid cooled and to add to Apple's incredible track-record of "
Think different" "
Design Different" and sometimes "
Screw the customer over with a different design" the liquid-cooled G5s were dying left and right in music studios due to leaks... from the web...
"I have a lab of 17 Dual 2.7Ghz G5s that are all now leaking their coolant- all at once. A significant number are dead in the water and the rest are just holding on right now. Symptoms are wide-ranged but will include fans spinning wildly, machines shutting down when they heat up, greenish liquid leaking from the case, and if you are able to look, crystalized liquid forming where the CPU meets the heatsink as well as corrosion of all the metal surrounding the CPU module. Eventually, the machines just stop working altogether necessitating a replacement of CPU, Logic Board, Power Supply, and two smaller parts. In one case the power supply started to shoot off black smoke and then died.
"As of yet, Apple has been fairly unresponsive in fixing or replacing them and I am now working on making this more public. I am curious to know if any other people are having this problem. I know of 3 other cases outside our own lab here. The machines in our lab were the first of the dual 2.7s- they were bought right when the came out."
I can tell you as an Apple-tech in the field in 2005 thru 2007, it was mind blowing to see $3500+ music studio and graphics studio machines with blown logic boards, and for added insult, the power supply was at the bottom, so, 4 out of 5 dead G5s had blown power supplies also; I can tell you this was NOT a "one-off"... I am just one guy, and I personally inspected a few dozen that leaked ! Man it was ugly... white liquid trails running into CPU sockets, blown logic boards, and then a small trail going directly into the Power supply, I almost didn't have the heart to show the client that forked over big bucks, the absolute destruction of their workhorse from just being used like a computer should be. Many were clean as a whistle with no dust and very little use and BAMMM, death. As irony and Apple go hand in hand, the slower and cheaper 2.3 was still air cooled and there are probably a lot of them still alive today, and also the single CPU models, but the most of the dual 2.5 or 2.7 units died in epic fashion.
This is probably Apple's worst "screw-over" to date, by never officially making a re-call... and just saying in 2006/2007 at the very height of the number of leak failures, "Hey sweet client, this new intel Mac pro is better than those shitty G5s in about 10 ways, so order now"
Talk about tangling a carrot, and wanting everyone to move on... I can say, that if you weigh acoustics, expand ability, reliability, and power, they finally got it right with the cheese-grater Mac Pro; it's just a shame so many valued customers had to pay a ton of cash for Apple's own G5 mistakes before the Mac Pro.