While working on another project, I came across this delightful blog post by Jay at The House of Moth, about the Power Mac G5:
How many fans does a Power Mac G5 have? Depending on the configuration this answer varies but you can be almost sure the answer is always one short. Let’s take a look at the Late 2005 Quad in this example.
– 2 intake fans (front inlet fan assembly)
– 2 exhaust fans (rear exhaust fan assembly)
– 1 fan in the PCI bay (speaker assembly)
– 1 fan for the hard drives (media bay fan)6 fans total, right? Wrong. There is a fan behind the hard drive fan as well, part of the media bay fan assembly (in some models), and it does not get the credit it deserves. Without this single fan your G5 can overheat and even die.
So where is this fan located exactly?
I won’t spoil it, but I will say that I had totally forgotten about this quirk of the Power Mac G5, and I gutted a bunch of them back in my day as a Mac Genius.