Last week a bought a Late 2005 G5 Quad Core for 20 GBP! All included apart from the Hard drive and the fact it doesn't work....

It appears to be a power supply problem however now that I have tried two replacements I am getting skeptical as to whether:

a) I reassembled it correctly (think I id though)

All the power supplies that I have been supplied with are not working.

With the latest one the following happens:

1) With no CPU's attached - CPU LED lights come on (the red ones near the RAM slots)
2) When screwing the CPU's in tightly the PSU simply clicks when the power lead is inserted.
3) When like this the switch will light up however no activity when turning on

Anybody a bit more familiar than me with these machines ?

Score!

Not sure if this helps.. recall reading a blog a while ago about replacing a dead G5 PSU with a standard PC (will need slight modification - break out the soldering iron!) ATX psu. I would replace the PSU first to eliminate that branch of troubleshooting.

-- found it

http://damntechnology.blogspot.com/2009/02...wer-supply.html

Swopping round a good PSU for a bad one... ok building a new one nah I'd either:

a ) electrocute myself and die
b ) cause a fire some later stage probably whilst asleep and die.

Cool to do though if your that way inclined...

Liquid-cooled G5 are well known for dead motherboards and cpu's. You should also be informed that G5 quad power supply are the 1000w version, not the 450w or 600w found in the single or dual cpu models.

Would agree with this.

However an ideal enclosure for a Hack and it gives you "Apple labelled" hardware

I had a new quad-core G5 bought in 2006. It overheated one day, because the ambient temp was really high (outside temps were in the high 90's). Get this: it took THREE trips back to Apple Care to get the dang thing fixed!! I believe, they swapped in other motherboards (which were returns). I remember a really FRUSTRATING time trying to debug this thing.

If the problem is a dead mobo, then it's hopeless (you're screwed).


BTW, my Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz runs real hot (defective engineering by Apple: doesn't dissipate heat, due to Apple wanting to get cute & make a thin notebook form-factor). Well known complaint by other users. Turns out this heat craps out the mobo, leading to the notorious "lower memory slot failure". There's a class-action lawsuit because of this. Apple refuses to admit the problem, which is well documented (see Apple forums). I've had THREE catastrophic failures of this laptop in the field (hot conditions), because of overheating: won't boot, & OS X needs to be re-installed. My PC laptop alongside (fat thickness to dissipate heat, which is properly engineered) ran just fine in these hot environments.

What is with Apple, can they not design hardware that properly dissipates heat?? (can't break the laws of Physics)

What makes you think that?