MacOSG:Liquid-Cooled Power Mac G5s leaking
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jun 11, 2006 at 11:08pm
By Dave Merten
Reports of liquid-cooled Power Mac G5’s leaking have been been popping up around the Net. Ryan Butterworth at Apple Discussions wrote, “So, we have six G5’s all ranging from Dual 1.8’s to a Quad G5. Came in to work today and my computer, a Dual 2.5, wouldn’t turn on. It would click on for about a third of a second and turn back off. Thought the power supply went on it. It was only a year and a half old. Disconnected everything and put it on the floor to try a different plug. I tipped the machine up to show a co-worker when another co-worker spotted liquid coming from the rear of the computer. NO WAY!! It was fine on Friday and untouched all weekend.”
I decided to do some more research and found a guy that had a unit 14 months old that leaked. He did not have AppleCare, but Apple agreed to fix it because it was less than 90-days out of warranty. A few months later, he had another unit leak. This time, the globs of glowing green goo got into his power supply and shorted it out. One of his co-workers described a bright flash and a loud buzzing crackle. Light-colored smoke poured out of the machine, and sizzling coolant dripped onto the aluminum handle. The “cheese grater” back grill had scorch marks. With both incidents, he said Apple was extremely cooperative and provided swift resolution by paying for the parts and labor required to restore the G5s back to working condition. He also noted that he did not lose any data on either machine.
So what’s going on here? It seems that the early 2.5 GHz liquid-cooled G5s shipped with Delphi radiators that were problematic. That may have been the reason Apple delayed shipment for three months after the liquid-cooled G5s were introduced. Apparently Apple may have been having problems with them from the beginning. So, what should you do if you own one? I would recommend pulling the side metal panel off periodically and checking the rear bottom floor of the computer for leaks. If you find a leak, get it serviced ASAP. Don’t keep using it. Also, Apple recommends cleaning the fluid up with
rubber gloves on. The fluid can irritate your skin.
Bottom line here, if you own a liquid-cooled Power Mac G5 less than a year old without AppleCare, I would highly recommend you purchase it ASAP if you plan on keeping it over a year. The cost to repair a leaky Power Mac G5 could run upward of $1,000.00 or more to replace the LCS (liquid cooling system) module.
(The graphic is from http://www.notmike.com)
The Mac Owners Support Group, aka MacOSG, was conceived in February, 2004 as the G5 Owners Support Group by Dave Merten, a former “Focus on Mac Support” guide at About.com. After purchasing a DOA Power Mac G5, and noticing on Apple Discussion Boards that people seemed to be having a lot of common hardware problems with them, Merten decided to open a support site for Power Mac G5 owners. He called it G5 Owners Support Group, registered the G5support.com domain and also applied to Apple to become an online Apple User Group.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
