Let’s have a look at the Apple Power Macintosh G5, a weighty space heater that can also perform computing tasks. Apple launched the G5 in 2003 with great fanfare, but nowadays it has a decidedly mixed legacy. In 2003 it was a desktop supercomputer that was supposed to form the basis of Apple’s product range for years to come, but within three years it had been discontinued, along with the entire PowerPC range, in favour of a completely new computing architecture. The G5 puts me in mind of an ageing footballer who finally has a chance to play a World Cup match; he is called up from the substitute’s bench, entertains the crowd for twenty minutes, but the team loses, and by the time of the next World Cup the uniform is the same but the players are all different. Our time in the sun is brief, the G5’s time especially so.
I’ve long been a PC person, and from my point of view the G5 came and went in the blink of an eye. I knew that it had a striking case and a reputation for high power consumption and heat output, and for being 64-bit at a time when that was rare in the PC world, but that’s about it. Almost fifteen years later G5s are available on the used market for almost nothing – postage is incredibly awkward – so I decided to try one out. Mine is a 2.0ghz dual-processor model, the flagship of the first wave of G5s. Back in 2003 this very machine was, in Apple’s words, “the world’s fastest, most powerful personal computer”.
Once I move into a bigger house (hopefully soon), the PowerMac G5 (and its successor, the tower Mac Pro) are definitely high on the list of computers I want to own just for the sake of owning them. These things are beautiful, and thermally speaking, incredibly well designed. I plan on building my own dual-Xeon machine somewhere next year, and I find it incredibly frustrating that nobody seems to sell computer cases with proper thermal channels, or “wind tunnels” if you will, that physically seperate the CPU airflow from the GPU airflow, PSU airflow, and possibly even hard drive air flow. Proper workstations do this – things like the PowerMac G5, tower Mac Pro, HP Z workstations, and so on – but cases for self-built PCs just do not offer this kind of functionality.
Not just about the G5… It’s a retrospective summary of how we got to today from back then… My favorite kind. d"Y~
For basic case suppliers, this is pretty much impossible to do, while actually being able to sell your cases. The reason that computer companies can do this is because they have more control over which motherboard will be inside of their systems, so they can afford to use custom cases -since they’ll purchase/produce the motherboards in bulk. Outside of a situation like that, there’s no way to guarantee the exact location of the processors & memory. So, there’s no way to know exactly how to place the windtunnels that blow over the motherboard, itself.
Edited 2017-11-28 05:32 UTC
Just picked up two Quad G5’s from a local recycler for $40 CAD a piece, managed to use the power supply from one and then rebuild both the liquid coolers, for spare processors. And just today managed to snag a 1.42ghz MDD G4 completely functional missing HDD for $70. These were the missing pieces I had been looking for. I love collecting the nicer looking Mac’s. Worst case you gut them and make sweet looking Hackintosh’s, best case you have a old school machine to play your classic games on.
So it’s funny that this gets covered now. There are lots of these machines disappearing into the recycling bin, great time to look for them. Get onto ebay scroll through all the stupidly priced units and find the recycling companies blowing them out for sub $100 on the G5’s and even some really nice G4’s.
I would suggest for the less technically inclined, Dual 2.3GHz units, A1047 if you want to tinker with MorphOS and A1117 if you want to run OS X or Linux PPC.
Edited 2017-11-28 05:39 UTC
The MDD was righteously priced at max 40 dollars or pickup unless it was a dual one or a Sonnet upgraded version. There are so many of those, and their value is only in that they are the last that can run OS9 natively. Perhaps nostalgians would like to run them, but i can not imagine any software that runs better on a classic mac than it does on sheepshaver or basilisk. Get an amiga instead, at least in that realm emulation can not do everything that the original hardware could.
I do not mean to be disparaging, i still use my Powerbook daily (5.2 17″) it is my main irc client through a kvm switch. But the MDD has crap cache can not beat anything (including the last pentium 3 at just about any speed (0.9 to 2.26 ghz aka dothan)
Edit after your edit: No! Morphos is not SMP and might never be (never say never though) AROS is SMP appearantly when using some source git. AROS will soon enough have protected memory for the kernel as well as native applications. And waht i mean by soon is whenever the devs get it done. They did the almost impossible by making the nvidia cards from Geforce 3,4,5k,6k,7k,8k,9,1h,2h,3h amd all the way up to the 480GTX usable for gamers with full 3d acceleration. On a system that should not be able.
Edited 2017-11-28 09:43 UTC
It’s just helpful to let people know you won’t be able to run MorphOS currently on the 2005 G5’s. I personally dual boot a 2.7GHz G5 between Tiger (OS 9 Classic support) and MorphOS and I agree with you, AROS is a better solution that you can currently run on your PC. Or even just emulate a Amiga OS 4.1 Machine.
@Thom: I always build my own systems too. I would assume the reason why self-build cases don’t do that is because of the infinite number of components that could fit in them. Each with a different shape etc. HP, Dell etc workstations have plastic molds that fit over carefully selected components, so they can design the plastic molds to fit and channel the airflow.
Enlight (my case maker of choice) ATX cases almost have an airflow channel for expansion cards – the plastic part meant to support the “front” (as determined by front of the case) end of full-lenght PCI cards (not that I ever had full-lenght one) also houses the front fan, and nicely directs the airflow from it over the PCI cards.
PS. Offtopic: from what is your avatar?
Edited 2017-11-29 01:29 UTC
I love the G5 quad, do not get me wrong. It was one of the best computers i ever owned. And Luigi Burdo shows what it can do in 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp8yxJHvxuo&feature=youtu.be
It is and was an amazing piece of hardware. However the capacitors were made from inferiour brand and fucked up early, the battery on the motherboard was lousy and the dust accumulation on the cooling fins was unacceptable as the box was not filtered properly.But the largest problem was the leaking cooling.
If you ever get one, recapp it as soon as you can and make sure the battery is new and of a better kind than what apple put in it. Then get some vulkanizing hot glue and seal that motherf liquid cooling. Yes, they all leak eventually.
As a full-on standard, even, BTX.
It didn’t take off in the enthusiast community because there was too much investment in ATX, and BTX’s specifications for CPU and RAM position were designed around the expectation of a northbridge, meaning that RAM performance was limited by long traces in integrated memory controller systems (read: anything with AMD processors, which enthusiasts preferred at the time, as well as Nehalem when that came out).
In any case, it is possible to build a separated flow system today, within the ATX standard – sure, it won’t be shrouded, but you could still do it. Use a tower cooler (which was actually, arguably, BTX’s big innovation), put enough fans on the front of the case to pull air in, and then use a blower-style GPU.
In the back of my mind there’s an inkling of going to a metal workshop and have them waterjet an aluminium plate that fits perfectly into the case. This is definitely possible and certainly not too expensive, but I wonder how they would get the right measurements from within the case.
This way, I could create two proper wind tunnels within the case – one for the CPUs, one for the GPU – and thermally control them separately, each with their own intake and exhaust fans.
It’s definitely something I keep in the back of my mind – I may contact a metal workshop to see if they can do it. Would be a ton of fun.
(as an aside: you can achieve similar or better results with custom watercooling, but I already have my own custom watercooled PC that I designed myself, and even just watercooling one CPU and GPU with a custom loop is insanely expensive, so doing that for a dual-CPU machine is prohibitive financially).
Edited 2017-11-28 11:12 UTC
You’d probably want to install the MB and everything in the case, then scan the inside with a 3D scanner to get the best results.
It also might be better to work with a shop which does 3D printing with a high-end printer.
Ultimately, BTX was introduced to solve the problems of cooling later Pentium 4 systems …so when Netburst died, there remained little reason for BTX in mainstream systems.
There was still the whole issue with PCI cards being upside down in a tower, an issue PCIe has inherited and which dates back to the days of PCI sharing motherboard space with ISA slots. It means passive cooling of cards is more difficult, which makes airflow more critical. Most GPUs these days have their own active cooling systems, but at least some of them might be possible to cool passively in a BTX case.
Sitting in a room with a few Mac Pro towers, I have never noticed the fans. Anytime I open them up, I want to take a picture.
And when I opened up the HP Z workstation, I was a little shocked.
So here is to hoping they like, bring it back.
I have a deep affection for my 2008 Mac Pro, even though its really long overdue for replacement. Every time I pop the side cover to clean it or upgrade something (so far its had a new graphics card – twice, an SSD installed, a USB3 PCI card and a replacement DVDR drive – which I now never use) I just marvel at its internal beauty.
At some point soon I will make the switch to 5K 27inch iMac but I know I won’t have the same level of affection for it as I have for my aluminium monster. It just feels like a special bit of kit.
My HP Z600 works well as a space heater also. However it does have a GTX 970 and 2 3.0GHz quad cores in it. Not yet had a game that it won’t run. My G5 however is used to prop the bedroom door open, allowing the Z600 to vent into the rest of the living space. Also doubles up as a stool, or a small table. I’d never use it to do computing tasks though.
Edited 2017-11-28 13:41 UTC
…I love HP Z workstations, and would love to have one. How happy are you with your Z600? I’m partial to the Z8x0 range myself, and tend to write off the lower end models – what’s your experience with the Z600?
When under load, the thing does tend to be a bit noisy, and there wasn’t much room inside to fit a full height graphics card, but if you pick the right bits, it’s a solid machine.
I picked up a cheap SATA3 SSD for it, however the motherboard only supports SATA2, and is very picky with SSD’s. I tried dropping in a SATA3 card, but that seemed to cause some severe instability, so i just bought a known compatible SSD instead.
Some of the biggest pluses to a Z600 is the financial cost. Cheap Z600’s can be found on ebay all of the time, and the CPU’s and (EEC DDR3) RAM is now even cheaper per GB than desktop stuff. In total, my z600 cost me ^Alb650, which was ^Alb150 over budget purely because of the replacement motherboard.
Worth noting is there’s 2 different versions of the motherboard, with slightly different chipsets (460840-002 is the earlier revision, 591184-001 is the later IIRC). The earlier one only accepts 55** series Xeons and 24GB RAM, whereas the later revision takes 55** and56** series xeons and 48GB RAM. I made the mistake of buying a barebones Z600 that had the earlier revision board in it, so i purchased a replacement for all the features.
Also noting, is the Z600 has a built-in floppy controller. It feels kind of strange having an 8C/16T machine with 24GB RAM in it, natively booting DOS from floppy.
I have an HP Z800 machine.
These are fantastic workstations. I have 2 x Xeon X5670 CPU, 256GB ram, a GTX 780 GPU, 400GB PCIe SSD and 3 x 4TB sata drives. It drives two monitors (an HP 3065 and a Samsung 4k TV I use as a monitor).
It runs Windows 7 and VMware workstation.
The only part to fail was the power supply (this machine was running 24×7) which was easy to find a replacement on Ebay.
I highly recommend any of the Z series machines for their robustness and quality builds.
They are cheap to buy as barebones (make sure you get the heatsinks with the chassis) and the older Xeon CPUs are inexpensive. DDR3 ECC ram is also reasonably priced. Watch out for the same thing The123king said above about the motherboards. The Z800 mobo (possibly the same as the Z600) has two revisions. The older one will only support Xeon 5500 series CPUs).
Perhaps the Dell or Lenovo equivalents are just as good?
Edited 2017-11-28 17:17 UTC
The Dell Precision line is well built, and they’re easy to work on. It’s pricey, but it’s good stuff.
I use a Lenovo workstation at work, and it’s just like their servers, it’s all screws and sharp edges in side. It’s 90s era build tech, and they are the least nice machines to work on.
Between HP, Dell, and Lenovo, I’d probably go with the Dell. They annoy me the least, and it’s easy to find parts.
Edited 2017-11-28 17:28 UTC
Yes, make sure you buy with heatsinks. The stock ones are super expensive and whilst it’s possible to cobble one together DIY style, it’s not easy and won’t look right. And if you’re wanting the high performance ones, be prepared for 3 digit prices.
I tried to keep my Z600 as stock as possible, even going as far as buying the official card reader for it. But if you’re just wanting a decent budget gaming/video editing rig, going down the DIY route with heatsinks etc may be the best option. The Z600 is still a solid machine for home use, and i have no intention of replacing it until the prices of E5 V3’s go down.
Also, whilst the XW8600 may look like an even better bargain, it’s not. Shortly before getting the Z600, i bought (and maxed out) a XW8600, and it was SLOW. The main bottleneck is those core2 CPU’s. I never realized how slow they were until i was getting better framerates on a 2013 macbook air than that XW8600 (with a GTX 470) was.
Agree on the XW series.
I have a XW8400 that I used before getting the Z800. It’s a nice looking machine but not worth spending the time and effort on them (unless you are a collector of workstations, then by all means go for it).
I can easily recommend any of the Z series. Even the Z200 and Z400 if you can get them cheap enough (although for the Z200 you might as well get the HP Elite 8200 or 8300 as they are very similar).
I recently picked up an HP Elite 8300 with i7-3770 for US$120. Had some spare ram, a low profile GPU and an SSD to put into it. It is a really great small form factor PC. (and it looks great with a CRT monitor on top of it)
Edited 2017-11-28 18:59 UTC
… have gotten easy.
Corsair, Fractal Design and Lian Li all make cases with dual chambers (and that’s just off the top of my head).
Many high end video cards are now “blower” style– for a small trade-off in dB, the card now becomes it’s own cooler– exhausting heat directly through the PCI slot covers.
PSU shrouds which isolate the PSU airflow from the rest of the case have become commonplace.
And while you can build your system with skyscraper like massive fan and fin coolers, liquid AIO (all in one) CPU coolers make it easy to move heat from the middle of the motherboard to the outside edge of the case.
Add to that the advances in fan technology like high static pressure fans with minimal dB levels, and it’s easy to build a quiet PC with excellent thermals, without needing highly engineered thermal ducting.
Of course, if you choke down the air intakes with tempered glass for aesthetic purposes, your cooling will, for lack of a better term, suck.
Unfortunately the PowerMac G5 is obsolete at this point being bested even by the Mac Mini using 1/4 of the power. However, the cheesegrater Mac Pro, properly decked out, is still a great machine which can still rival and in some cases surpass more modern Macs. The ability for it to house multiple optical drives and multiple big spinning hard disks in addition to PCIe cards makes it a unique and special Mac.
I agree that the G5 is stuck in a tough spot.
It can’t run the newer Mac OS and it can’t run the older, classic OS 9 (natively).
Running Linux or one of the BSDs is kind of a waste of electricity on these beasts.
I have five of them that I picked up several years ago (saved from the garbage). They do look fantastic though.
MorphOS would be a good candidate for one of them.
The dual CPU MDD G4 is great as it can run OS 9 natively. OS 9.2 can currently only be emulated with QEMU and even then there is no sound (some experimental builds have sound) and it runs a bit slow.
Grab some of these G3 or G4 macs before they become too expensive down the line.
A G5 running Leopard (which one can make the argument that Mac OS X went downhill from there) is a great machine for a lot of content creation and some basic web browsing (with TenFourFox). I run and blog some about my 2.3 Ghz G5 (at g5center.net). There is still a solid PPC community sharing tips and figuring out how to hack around Dropbox to keep it working and make use of other things. But internet-wise, they aren’t getting any more secure or faster.
Beautifully designed computers.
Having briefly owned a 2010 era Mac Pro, I can say that Apple reached the pinnacle of good workstation design with that tower. Not a single tool is necessary to add or change components, and it is virtually silent even at full throttle, compared to any other workstation on the market at the time.
I only sold mine because I didn’t like the direction macOS was going with Yosemite and higher, and the power supply was beginning to show signs of dying soon.
I too would absolutely love to build a clone of the Mac Pro using a workstation class motherboard, but as you’ve found Thom, the choices are thin. Right now I’m running a Z170M board in a Thermaltake “Cube” case that, while it looks nice and it has a sensible and functional thermal design, is still a thrown together mess in the end.
Singularity[1] has some nice hardware for approaching what I would consider a good custom build, and they have a partner in the Netherlands (Highflow), you may want to check them out. I’ve never bought from them but their products look amazing.
[1] https://www.singularitycomputers.com/
I don’t actually have a system from them, but the system I designed and built myself – my workstation and gaming machine – uses the same case.
https://twitter.com/thomholwerda/status/926138319804780544
This is my first attempt at a custom loop, so it’s obviously nowhere near the level you see in the link you provided, but hey, my next attempt will be a little closer to that
.
I had a PM G3 B&W tower back then and the PM G5 was like a dream to me, just perfect.
Got a dual-core G5 when the last one came out: http://t2sde.org/hardware/workstation/Apple/G5/ and a “pseudo second gen” MacPro: http://t2sde.org/hardware/workstation/Apple/MacPro/
Performance sucks from todays point. The G5 draws 150 Watt idle in OpenFirmware, ~130 Watt idle in Linux
The MacPro sucks majorly too. Wish I had not brought an early one (when they were new! 
with developer discount at least). A 4,1 or so would be so much more usable today, …
I enjoy turning on my maxed out (1.2 GHz) cube more though, at least it does not draw so much power either: http://t2sde.org/hardware/workstation/Apple/Cube/
Edited 2017-11-29 12:38 UTC
Having recently bought dual processor 3,1 MacPro (that unfortunately was damaged during transportation, having one of its stands bent) for around $400 (standard price where I live for this kind of machine) I must say that I am really amazed by the quality, expandability and culture of these old Macs. Cheaply upgraded to 32GB ram (with place for 24 more), PCIe SSD, new-ish GPU it works better than the PC my company bought me this year (first wave of Ryzen boards and cheapo GPU). Only things I miss are proper HighSierra support (without the need to disable SIP) and better bluetooth (and this only because I’m not going to pay 100 extra bucks to get pice card). System is quiet (although I have custom fan curve, because of non-Apple ram), fast and I hope it will serve me at least 2-3 years more (I’ll then hunt for 5,1 Mac pro in similar pice range).
Unless you’re relying on macOS, by the time you’re ready to buy that 5,1 model you’d be better served building your own or getting a modern workstation from Dell or Lenovo. I say that as someone who loved his 5,1 Mac Pro, warts and all, but I had a Lenovo ThinkCentre Sandy Bridge workstation that ran circles around that 2010 Mac Pro. The Mac was the better built and more beautiful machine, and more expandable, but the Lenovo was much, much faster in Windows and Linux.
Now, if you’re wanting an expandable workstation for macOS in a few years, Apple may have something in the pipeline for you. There’s been rumors for the past year of a “new Mac Pro” that will be a smaller version of the old tower Pro. They’ve realized their limitations with the Trash Can Pro and they are supposedly going back to a modular tower design of some sort. If it goes as the rumors say and gives you options for GPU and other PCI-E components, married to a modern Xeon CPU (E7 or Platinum), it would be a no-brainer.
They were great. I had one, the problem is that even today, you^aEURTMre limited to OSX 10.5 and any other OS runs ultra slow.
The power usage on the things is insane as well.
I had one of these. It was powerful, but not as powerful as an equivalent Intel system, and this was only because of MacOS X design faults.
When MacOS X was ported to the Intel platform, only a short time afterward did developers notice that the operating system’s approach to support graphics drivers was the real performance problem. It was not the CPU because PowerPC and the IBM POWER were outperformers on other platforms like IBM AIX.
Had Apple noticed that the performance gap was caused by their operating system’s device driver problem before transitioning to the Intel x86-64 platform, we might still be using powerful PowerPC Macs and maybe even an IBM POWER Mac, but I digress.
The warning sticker inside the case that states that moisture appearing inside the case is not normal made me laugh.
PowerPCs were fine. Apple screwed up with their lousy operating system that didn’t allow graphics drivers to reach their full potential.
Edited 2017-11-30 04:52 UTC
PowerPC were not fine for what Apple wanted to primarily use the processors in, high performance and low power consumption machines… (laptops)
Actually, the transition was to x86 “32” – first Intel Macs used Core Duo, which were 32 bit only.
I think the shift to Intel would have happened regardless, especially because of the problems they were having designing a G5-based laptop. They just ran too hot and drew too much power at the time–a real pity, when I was able to squeeze 13 hours of battery life out of my iBook G4 (nothing in the Intel market could beat that at the time). I was always hoping for an iBook or PowerBook G5, but the physics just weren’t happening. I suppose it’s theoretically possible we could have ended up with PowerPC-based workstations alongside Intel or even ARM-based Mac laptops, but I doubt Apple would have wanted the extra cost of supporting two separate architectures long-term.
Seriously, you pay me shipping and I will ship you one. I have a fully functional one in very good condition in my storage building. Would love to get rid of it but have no wanted to toss it.
Is this an offer to Thom or an open to everybody one?
If open one – in what part of the world is said storage building? 
(to guesstimate if shipping is worth it, and to determine if power supply unit is compatible with electricity at my place)
If the case is well designed WRT airflow. There are several really nice case makers out there that will give you top notch airflow and they won’t break the bank.
Take for example my own case which won PC magazines “coolest case” award the year it was released, the Rosewill Thor. It has 3 140mm fans and 1 230mm fan and paired with a good Zalman air cooler even when I flipped the turbo button on my board which OCed my FX-8320e to 4.5Ghz the CPU never got above 120f because the airflow is just so damned good in that case. At stock speeds I have the fan controller cranked all the way down and my CPU sits at around 5f above room temp idle and around 107f when I’m doing video renders and the same goes for my R9 280, the air gets pulled away from hot components so well I haven’t given temps a second thought in nearly 3 years, its just not an issue for me anymore.
So just get yourself a decent case and you won’t have to worry about “wind tunnels” because the entire case will have enough airflow that temps just won’t be something you have to deal with.
bassbeast,
Yes, but as I’m sure you know, modders often like to try things because they can, rather than because it’s necessary. I’m in that boat too every now and then, I’d do it a whole lot more if I had more funds to play around with