G5 2.1ghz iMac Road-kill

[uridium]

So.. $parent ends up in hospital again and the other night I'm driving home after visiting hours and spotto a G5 in a pile of detritus out front of this place.

This thing is fiiiiiilthy and has old UNSW stickers all over it. Some smoker had it and it's just gummed up.

So I get it home, plug it in, gingerly stand back and poke the power button. It plays the bongo, the white LED on the bottom right glows for a while. Then it powers off.

Bad PSU? 

 

[Gorgonops]

G5 iMacs are notorious for bad motherboard capacitors, could well be that.

 

[Macdrone]

Also bad power supply caps.  I got an ALS one years ago at goodwill for cheap, when you could still find them there, before I knew how to solder at all, got a spare off eBay and is good even now.  Gave it to someone down the street and they are still using it.  I would go with motherboard caps first as thats a known issue.

 

[Unknown_K]

They are easy enough to open up for a look. I recapped 3 of those things and it is quite a bit of work if you don't have good tools. Motherboards and PS need recapped, but once done they are reliable.

 

[uridium]

I should be able to re-cap it. I've done a few other systems.  I used to own a 1.8mhz 20" G5 "back in the day". I was doing some serious fortran on it for a while that could benefit from altivec (sadly it was slower than my dual G4 with 7448b's but that's another story ..) .. running for nearly 3 months solid since purchase date the PSU went fut and the caps vomited everywhere. I remember the disbelief I got from the warranty people. Actually I should still have photo's of that. It was the one with the nvidia 5200 ultra.

I assumed this given it's a few models on would be better.

Okay. Caps it'll be. Thanks for the heads up

Shall report back.

 

[Hrududu]

The models with iSights are more like the early Intel iMacs than the other G5 iMacs.  Not nearly as easy to get into, and have different problems.  If its as gross as you say, it could be a fan failure/overheating issue.  I'd clean out the air exhaust really well and verify the machine isn't overheating.  The one iSight G5 I had actually had a failed GPU, so heat-gunning it actually brought mine back to life.

 

[uridium]

Thanks Hrududu. Quite useful advice. Sadly the system was unservicable. After a recap it'd sort of work. Putting my finger on a couple of bga packages I noticed one was super-hot and had lifted and cracked mostly halfway down the middle. End of life. So I've dug bits out that I can and junked the rest. Perhaps one day I'll find another.