Today I opened my iMac G5 (it hasn’t been opened since 2004, except for when I upgraded the RAM and HDD), so I decided to remove everything, clean it up and re-paste the CPU/GPU/U3 chipset. Took me about one hour to do that, luckily I have the iMac G5 model that’s sooooo easy to open up (unlike the older versions, ALS and iSight). I haven’t noticed any difference in temperatures (CPU idles at 60 degrees and in full load goes to 70 degrees with a max peak of 72) but the old thermal paste was more like thermal flakes. My iMac wasn’t really noisy before, but I think it might be even less now. The Nvidia GPU had a thermal pad on it, which I also replaced with Noctua’s NT-H2 paste that I’ve been using on my iBook G4. The paste on the U3 chipset was looking way better than the CPU one, I guess the temperatures there aren’t as extreme.
For a 21-years-old machine, it just works and does its job perfectly, providing me with hardware and software so I can write on my website, work on various projects (like the Café, my forks of Firefox, Thunderbird, Alkor, etc), and play the games I love. What more can you ask?
Currently the iMac is upgrading Macports and dependencies (without the dreaded gcc15). I’ll be working on an article about Apple’s iMac G5 and it’ll go next to the iBook G4.
