Powermac G5
Apple's G5 Powermac's are rather infamous, being Apple's "last gasp" of PowerPC. The PowerMac G5 Quad in particular is easily among Apple's most unloved and slapdash engineered products.
Due to me taking the suggestion of a friend far too literally (ilu Ben please don't hate me) I own FOUR (soon five!) G5 Quads
Despite this only one of them is (as of December 2025) functional!
All Mac G5 Quads were made with "liquid cooling" loops, due to the thermal output of the CPU's at the time. (105 watts of heat in 2005 is a lot, though with what Intel puts out these days seems rather pedestrian!) however calling it water cooling is incorrect. It's actually radiator fluid! Specifically glycol.
The water cooling loops were designed and manufactured by American car maker GM Auto's engine radiator subsidiary. Your G5 Mac literally uses car parts to cool its CPU's! It's any wonder Apple ditched IBM.
It's possible (and desirable) to replace the entire cooling assembly, the 68KMLA forms calls it the "New Blood Mod" though I have not yet performed the repairs on my units due to cost.
Anyway. The one singular G5 Quad I have working is effectively a maxed out G5 Quad. The specifications are listed below
4x 2.5Ghz PPC64 G5 CPU's (2c/2t)
16GB DDR2-667 (or 800? I forget the max speed) RAM. In theory the chipset can support 32GB but nobody has managed to get one operating with that much memory.
Two 240GB SATA SSD's. Due to Apple's flaky SATA controller most drives won't work as negotiating SATA 3 speeds down to SATA 1 causes the controller to instead hang. You may want to find drives that have a SATA1 jumper option to prevent this!
ATi Radeon X9150 (Mac vBIOS flashed)
Unfortunately G5 Quads cannot run Tiger due to missing fan control drivers. If installed, the fans will eventually ramp to 100% as a failsafe mechanism.
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