Well not all G5s are liquid cooled, basically if its clock speed is 1.6, 1.8 or 2.0, regardless of processor count, its air-cooled and thus has no chance of spontaneous combustion. All of the air-cooled G5's at my old place of business are still alive and kicking and performing their duties just fine.
Its just that you can get a used Intel mac for around the same price as a decent G5 and even the oldest Intels are still much faster than everything but the very fastest G5's. Case in point, according to the Geekbench 2 scores in MacTracker, the first-generation 1.83GHz MacBook Pro (thats the Yonah based model), is only slower than the Quad-G5, a machine that still goes for quite a bit on eBay. It even out-paces the dual 2.7 behemoth. And as I mentioned earlier, there is no guarantee that Apple will continue to support G5's, or the PPC platform at all, for very much longer. Steve is not a fan of looking backwards. It is definitely a shaft to people who have invested alot into their PPC machines, but as a potential buyer of a "new" machine it would be beneficial to just get the newer technology and avoid that mess.
There were also two different types of cooling units, one by Panasonic and one by...somebody else, i forget who, the one by Panasonic actually works brilliantly and has a much lower failure rate than the other. Everytime you hear about a G5 catching fire or leaking, its one of the earlier, crappier designs with the O-rings i mentioned earlier.
Its just that you can get a used Intel mac for around the same price as a decent G5 and even the oldest Intels are still much faster than everything but the very fastest G5's. Case in point, according to the Geekbench 2 scores in MacTracker, the first-generation 1.83GHz MacBook Pro (thats the Yonah based model), is only slower than the Quad-G5, a machine that still goes for quite a bit on eBay. It even out-paces the dual 2.7 behemoth. And as I mentioned earlier, there is no guarantee that Apple will continue to support G5's, or the PPC platform at all, for very much longer. Steve is not a fan of looking backwards. It is definitely a shaft to people who have invested alot into their PPC machines, but as a potential buyer of a "new" machine it would be beneficial to just get the newer technology and avoid that mess.
There were also two different types of cooling units, one by Panasonic and one by...somebody else, i forget who, the one by Panasonic actually works brilliantly and has a much lower failure rate than the other. Everytime you hear about a G5 catching fire or leaking, its one of the earlier, crappier designs with the O-rings i mentioned earlier.