Bad News - My iMac G5 Motherboard Has Problems
Packed off my iMAC G5 to the Apple store. I told them the symptoms of display video shaking, powering down on its own, can not power it up sometimes, and locks up with a blue screen. It wasn’t lack of memory.
The Genius Bar guy opened it up in less than a minute, took a ten second look inside, and said, “you need a new motherboard. The capacitors are bulging and blowing out electrolytic stuff. Sorry, your warranty was up two months ago. And, that is going to cost you somewhere around $750.00. Why don’t you just get a new one? The new ones are so much faster and better. Also, you are real close to the price of a new one too.”
Well, that didn’t sit well with me. I packed it back up and brought it home. I started doing more research and found the whole industry, including Apple had manufactured motherboards with defective capacitors in the past three or four years. These capacitors were built using a stolen recipe from Taiwan. Now all these motherboards are starting to have leaky and drying up electrolytic capacitors all over the place.
Now, since I don’t have anything to lose, I decided to remove the mother board from the computer. I’ll pick up (20) 1,800 uF 6.3 volts capacitors and (5) 1,000 uF 16 volts capacitors next week and try replacing every single one on the bad mother-board. To remove the mother-board, you have to remove the hard drive, the computer power supply, and the Super drive too. In addition, you need to unplug and unscrew several sensors on the board itself. Then you need to unscrew all the screws holding it to the mounted chassis. Then very carefully, you need to extract it from the computer. Be sure you find all the hidden screws. If I get a chance I’ll take some pictures of this process. In the meantime take a look at these pictures (one of the pictures is above) showing the mother board replacement assembly in total. Replace iMac G5 Motherboard
For the latest update go to Repairing an Apple iMac G5 Motherboard, according to Jim. See first hand with a how-to show and tell of what is involved with this Apple motherboard repair.
2 months ago