Chosen Solution

So I recently got a G5 iMac that suffers from the bad caps. Apple says they’ll fix it for a cool $700… which I’m not interested in doing. If you refer to the pictures below, you’ll see that only 1 cap on the board has gone bad thus far. Currently, my symptoms are constantly running fans, and the inability to sleep. If I hit the sleep button, the machine instead switches off without any kind of warning- not a good thing. So I’m willing to bet that the cap on the board is related to the fans, and I guess that there’s probably a bad capacitor in the power supply as well. So, here’s my questions:

  1. Once one cap goes, how long is it before the other capacitors start dying? And is there any way to prolong their life?
  2. Has anyone repaired the caps before? I’ve got a friend who’s really good with a solder iron, so I might be able to twist his arm into helping me out. How difficult did you find it to replace them? Thanks!

If one cap is gone replace them all. These parts have a limited lifespan and if one went, the others will follow. You can purchase them at digikey, recommended. The soldering is not really easy, it’s all lead free which requires quite high temperatures but incidently i’m just sitting here in front of an iMac G5 which i succesfully repaired this way. Go for it :-)

Please refer to this question: Replacing the capacitors on a iMac G5

These days there are several sources on Ebay which furnish complete kits for specifically repairing this model of iMac. They are presorted, and you don’t have to worry about the ratings, voltages and physical size being correct. At around $20+shipping, this is by far the easiest method to acquire these caps. I have resurrected 3 iMac G5s with Ebay cap kits. Note that capacitors can fail without showing visible signs such as leakage and bulging.

Best to open up the power supply and take a look at the capacitors there, I’d say the power supply is more likely to fail than the motherboard and a bad supply will put out ripple the mother board will try and smooth, so yes, conversely, the mother board probably helps the power supply out.

Look here: www.badcaps.net for capacitor kits. They also do repairs if you’re not keen on doing it yourself.

http://jimwarholic.com this site sell the best high quality capacitor kit for any model of the g5. I just replace the 16 caps on my imac g5 isight, and it’s working like new.!!