Saving the Quad G5: Liquid to Air Cooled Conversion

The Apple Power Macintosh G5 Quad Core was Apple’s most powerful PowerPC Mac ever—and also one of its riskiest, thanks to a notoriously failure-prone liquid cooling system. In this video, I take on the challenge of converting a subscriber’s G5 Quad from liquid to air cooling, using donor CPUs, custom mounting solutions, and a whole lot of patience.

This isn’t just a teardown—it’s a full restoration and performance shootout. I benchmark the air-cooled Power Macintosh G5 Quad Core against my own liquid-cooled unit using Geekbench 2, Xbench, and Cinebench 2003. The results? Shockingly close. The only thing holding this machine back is a traditional hard drive instead of an SSD.

Whether you’re a vintage Mac collector or a PowerPC enthusiast, this video shows that with the right approach, the G5 Quad can still dominate in 2025. Want to compare your own G5? Submit your benchmarks below and join the SphereScale community.

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Hashtags
#powermacg5 #MacRestoration #vintagemac #SphereScore #G5Conversion #geekbench #xbench #ApplePowerMac #retrocomputing #macupgrade

Keywords
Power Mac G5 Quad Air Conversion Apple Power Macintosh G5 Quad Core Benchmarks Restoration

Index

00:00 - Project intro & liquid cooling risks
02:20 - Teardown & coolant leak discovery
04:07 - CPU transplant & heatsink challenges
06:54 - Zip tie solution & first successful boot
10:12 - Benchmarks: Geekbench, Xbench, Cinebench
14:00 - SphereScale score reveal
15:07 - SphereScore breakdown
17:18 - Final thoughts & restoration reflection