Heatsink on the left is from the 2.3, and the heatsink on the right is from 2.0.
Cheers, Nikola!
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QUAD G5 AIR COOLED (dxf included)
- Thread starter MrVitalic
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Heatsink on the left is from the 2.3, and the heatsink on the right is from 2.0.
Cheers, Nikola!
when i air cooled the g5 i had, i never had to pug in the lcs in order for it to pass the calibration. but this was also the PCI-X models.
G5 LCS to air
G5 LCS to air
I noticed on this YouTube video no modification to the heat sink was required?
Also, pertaining to the daughter card heat sink I saw this note on the YouTube video in the comments section:
Beniamino Cenci-Goga4 months ago
There's no need to swap daughter heat sink. The only difference is that the pipe on liquid cooled processors (2.5 and 2.7) is taller to avoid interferences with the Delphi pump, but on air cooling there's no differences, so both are fine. I left the original. The swap would be necessary in case you want to use slower processors (1.8, 2.0) in LCS.
Also, pertaining to the daughter card heat sink I saw this note on the YouTube video in the comments section:
Beniamino Cenci-Goga4 months ago
There's no need to swap daughter heat sink. The only difference is that the pipe on liquid cooled processors (2.5 and 2.7) is taller to avoid interferences with the Delphi pump, but on air cooling there's no differences, so both are fine. I left the original. The swap would be necessary in case you want to use slower processors (1.8, 2.0) in LCS.
I’m sorry for the late response. Man, this video is about converting a 2004 model to air cooling which is pretty easy using parts from a 2004 air cooled dual processor ( single core each) 2.0ghz.
My conversion is about a 2005 model (different motherboard, different cpu board, different mounting, different heatsink, different backplane). 2004 and 2005 machine are different beast. The only parts you can exchange are fans, dvd drives, hdd, hdd sled. Thats it. Even the front panel i/o is different, same for the power supply.
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The above only works for those generation of G5's, the Quad is totally different. What is ironic is that the single pump G5 I have is still working since day one - never has it ever leaked and I seriously doubt it will.
You might get reliable water cooling made by Panasonic. The earlier pump made by Delphi was susceptible to leak.
I’m glad yours still work. Mine was already clogged and I’m sure every lcs will clog overtime. Its a pita working on a closed loop system, air cooling is the way my man.
Dont remember what model it is (dual pump). I got the best of both world, a G5 and a macpro hooked together
Hi! I am new here my name is Wade this is my first post! I always wanted to join macrumors and I figured now would be the perfect time. I recently acquired a quad on eBay for 54$ with a failed LCS. (no surprise 🙄😂) and i wanted to air cool it as I am not a fan of liquid cooling either. I saw your thread and decided to do the same! I acquired two heat sinks just like OP used which was rather difficult to find nowadays. I did my cuts with a mitre saw with a metal cutting disc and a sawzall And hack saw. Then I used flat and round files, a special tool I made to straighten the fins and a lot of blood sweat and tears to shape these beasts into the heat sinks they needed to be!
Here is one of my heat sinks after measurement.
Here it is after the cuts, it looked horrendous!
This is what it looked like when I was done. It took 2 hours to make it look good! The g5 nipple clearance was done with a round file.
This is my finale fit! They are very tight
Here are the results! Temps idle around 45c after a good warm up. When first turned on they idle around 38c. They max out around 65ish on geekbench. Running very quiet and quick with a SSD installed and 10gb of ram. My next investment is going to be a x1900gt as I am still running the stock 6600 which is painfully slow.
Hope everyone enjoys my take on this project. I must say I don’t think the heats sinks are 2.0 or 2.3 specific. I have a 2.3 unit that I purchased from the original owner (original box too😃) and it has what OP said was a 2.0 heat sink. And when I purchased one of these heat sinks it was a 2.0 processor attached to it. I think it’s just a rev b and rev a type thing with the pictured heat sink being the improved one.
Here is one of my heat sinks after measurement.
Here it is after the cuts, it looked horrendous!
This is what it looked like when I was done. It took 2 hours to make it look good! The g5 nipple clearance was done with a round file.
This is my finale fit! They are very tight
Here are the results! Temps idle around 45c after a good warm up. When first turned on they idle around 38c. They max out around 65ish on geekbench. Running very quiet and quick with a SSD installed and 10gb of ram. My next investment is going to be a x1900gt as I am still running the stock 6600 which is painfully slow.
Hope everyone enjoys my take on this project. I must say I don’t think the heats sinks are 2.0 or 2.3 specific. I have a 2.3 unit that I purchased from the original owner (original box too😃) and it has what OP said was a 2.0 heat sink. And when I purchased one of these heat sinks it was a 2.0 processor attached to it. I think it’s just a rev b and rev a type thing with the pictured heat sink being the improved one.
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@Wizzlemane96 Good lord 😲 Thats some work you did there. All my congratulation on your project!! 👍👍👍
Thank you!! I worked hard on it since around Christmas but I must say, the biggest pain was tracking down some heat sinks! First heatsink I did I used just the mitre saw and it turned out REALLY ugly I should have took a picture. Took probably 4-6 hours to shape that one. I did it Over a period of 3 days on down time. On the second (the one I pictured) I used a sawzall to cut almost all the fins then cut the bottom plate and the rest with mitre saw which proved to be MUCH cleaner cut although i still was filing for a long time. Thank god I bought a brand new file!
I always wanted a quad forever but the liquid cooling nightmare always turned me away. I finally picked this one up extremely cheap and I started researching an air cooled solution to get ideas and saw this thread! Looking forward to having years of maintenance free (other than thermal paste) service from this machine!
Oh yes finding these heatsink is quite the challenge. The fit and finish you achieved is great. Theres another member on macrumors, inspired by this thread, that was sucessfull in this conversion using heatsink from a 2004 single core dual processor. He say that temps are ok but ehh, the heatsink from a 2005 is beefier. What he did was rotate the mounting plate 180deg on his 2004 hs. I also did a conversion to air cooling on my dp 2004. I dont want to be nervous all the time thinking about clogged lcs or leak, life is much simpler with air cooled mac/pc. Enjoy your quad my friend. If yours start to have power issue, check the psu, these caps will need replacement at one point in time. Have a nice day!
*If you want to push your cpus to the max, check out the app called ‘power fractal’ and use the maximum setting with altivec on. It help to test the maximum temp your cpu could get with this set-up and fan speed🤗
*If someone know an app that can generate fractal frame by frame on ppc mac (to make a video from), let me know.
That’s funny I was gonna do that same conversion before I saw this thread! I built a powermac i7 and had two of those heat sinks laying around. I heard they will only work if they are the ones with copper cold pads. Mine were aluminum. I didn’t care for the having them backwards because they didn’t mount well to the heat sinks and I felt it was more work to have to make plates to the back since they ain’t long enough. Didn’t fit well with my OCD and especially to have a possible overheating mac in the end. This almost could pass for a factory option with the way the cpus fit the heat sinks.
Thanks for the advice I will definitely try that program. My old LCS is still in pieces I was debating doing a thermal calibration but tbh I’m debating if I even need to 😂 seems to be working just fine fans almost never kick on and when they do it’s hardly anything in my opinion. If I do tho I wonder if I can hook my pump up and just let it free spin or if I should hook it in line to the radiator with some water so it’s under a load. Idk if the computer can tell the difference. I imagine it can since it looks like the pump has some sort of PWM feature with how many wires it has hooked up. maybe I should experiment and report back if I decide to even do it at all.
@Wizzlemane96
@MrVitalic
I'd love to know what the temps are like using the 2.3GHz (or improved) heatsinks running something more intensive for a longer period. Would you be willing to run Cinebench R11 for one full render and see what the peak temps are?
You can download it here: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/cinebench-r11-powerpc
@MrVitalic
I'd love to know what the temps are like using the 2.3GHz (or improved) heatsinks running something more intensive for a longer period. Would you be willing to run Cinebench R11 for one full render and see what the peak temps are?
You can download it here: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/cinebench-r11-powerpc
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More updates! I tried power fractal and ran a test twice it seemed to really be able to stress the system. For some reason cpu b likes to run a few degrees hotter than cpu a not sure why. 🤷♂️
I tried Cinebench upon request and also ran the test twice. Didn’t seem like cinebench stressed it as hard as power fractal did.
I also got an ati x1900gt installed today. Much better video playback and web performance.
so far so good with this system! Other than the oddness with cpu b running hotter gonna look into that a bit. Here’s a few more pictures.
I tried Cinebench upon request and also ran the test twice. Didn’t seem like cinebench stressed it as hard as power fractal did.
I also got an ati x1900gt installed today. Much better video playback and web performance.
so far so good with this system! Other than the oddness with cpu b running hotter gonna look into that a bit. Here’s a few more pictures.
Wow, those temps are great. I have no idea why Apple thought liquid cooling was necessary. What was the Cinebench score? I only got 1.54 but I think my Quad is throttling. The temps on CPU A Core 2 spike up to 97-98C then drops to mid 70s over and over again during the test.
Core 1 runs cooler and both cores on CPU B are significantly cooler so I think the LCS is still in good shape. Likely just due for a repaste after 16 years.
Core 1 runs cooler and both cores on CPU B are significantly cooler so I think the LCS is still in good shape. Likely just due for a repaste after 16 years.
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Yeah the paste is probably pretty crispy by now on your quad if it’s original. It seems like the LCS hold up fairly well when constantly used. When they sit unused for years then get turned on is when problems seem to persist.
The cinebench score was 1.98 the fans rev up a bit during the test but nothing that bothers me. When it had the LCS in it the fans would run almost full blast at idle.
Yep, definitely throttling then with my 25% lower score. My Quad just arrived today from eBay. Had a nice discussion with the seller, who was the original owner. It's definitely been sitting for several years but its in near mint condition and even came with the original box. Also came with a Radeon X1900 already installed too which is great because the 6600LE is garbage. The G5 cover had never been removed before as the plastic nub was still in place. It has the later revision single pump LCS which is supposed to be the more reliable one I think. Didn't look like there was any leakage but we'll see for sure once I get it apart.
Sounds like a nice unit! Always nice to get an unmolested core. Mine was missing many parts and came in a very rough case. I had a 2.3 unit that I bought on eBay from the original owner and like yours was unmolested in the original box and in mint condition. I ended up putting all the quad guts into its case and used all the parts I needed to make it a complete computer. So now I am probably gonna sell the old 2.3 motherboard and cpu and other misc parts and use the beat up case for another custom build.
I have heard conflicting reports but I think the dual pump is better for not leaking as the cpu blocks are sealed copper blocks vs the plastic block with plate and o ring on the single pump. But I also believe that the single pump when working properly will cool better than the dual does. The dual has the radiator divided half for each cpu vs the single shares the whole thing. The single is more rare on quads and is usually on the early models as it’s carried over from the previous generation 2.5 and 2.7 models except with better quality o rings and all hoses instead of partial metal lines. The old generation are absolutely guaranteed to leak haha. Especially the 2.7 it seems to be the worst for unknown reasons.
I’m sure you be ok with yours since it’s working at all mine would just flatline immediately or overheat after boot with fans blaring. You could probably do a leak check and if it’s good do a flush and thermal paste.
This is THE best write up on the single pump LCS on the internet. Unfortunately it got taken down years ago but thankfully the way back machine saves the day!
Work Log of Apple Power Mac G5 Quad Liquid Cooling System Repair
web.archive.org
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Interesting, I was under the impression that the single pumps were a later revision because I went back on the Macrumors forums to November 2005 (curious as to what people at the time thought about it) and the first thread with photos of the cooling system from the month after release were of the dual pump LCS.
Regardless, I got it apart, applied new paste to both CPUs and the GPU, and put it back together. Thankfully it still works but the temps did not improve. It is still throttling, albeit not quite as much as my Cinebench score is now 1.77. Peak temps during the test were 76, 98, 61, 60 so it looks like the pump and coolant are still good based on CPU B's temps but there may be something wrong with the water block for CPU A. I'm really not sure why Core 1 and 2's temps are so far apart though. I assumed it was paste related before but that can't be it.
I really don't want to disassemble the LCS so I think I'm just going to leave it. I'm not running any applications that put 100% load on all 4 cores for any extended period of time so the temps during general usage are acceptable for now.
EDIT: Fun side note, the Celeron N3450 in my fanless mini PC scores about 1.9 in Cinebench R11.5. It's a quad core running at 2.2GHz. So the PowerPC 970mp has roughly equal IPC performance to Intel's Goldmont core from 2016, just at ~40x the power draw. I wonder how much of that is 90nm vs 14nm and how much is architectural.
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There are screens in the hose barbs of each cpu block that are probably dirty.
if you cleaned those screens and refilled it you would probably be in good working order but if it works for what your doing no point in bothering.
thats interesting I’m sure it’s a little of both but the 90nm vs 14nm is probably the biggest factor.
I picked up this 2.3GHz heatsink with the processor card still installed from eBay. On the lookout for another one but I’m not sure how I’d go about modifying it since I don’t have the proper tools. Might have to take them to a machine shop or something.
I’m actually considering just putting it on one of my 2.5GHz cards as is and running a single processor for the time being. Might end up being faster since I’ve been running the quad in reduced mode anyway to keep the fan noise down. The LCS can still keep the temps mostly under control in automatic mode but it has to run the fans at near full blast during anything intensive.
I’m actually considering just putting it on one of my 2.5GHz cards as is and running a single processor for the time being. Might end up being faster since I’ve been running the quad in reduced mode anyway to keep the fan noise down. The LCS can still keep the temps mostly under control in automatic mode but it has to run the fans at near full blast during anything intensive.