Member Avatar for Beatdetective

Hello everyone,

I've just joined today and have come up through the electronics industry, moving over to the IT industry where I have had experience building and repairing PCs and more recently repairing G3 and G4 Power Macs.

I have just aquired a faulty G5 Dual 1.8GHz PowerMac. This machine will not turn on. When the power cable is plugged into the back and the power is turned on at the wall switch there is a clicking sound like a relay activating. When the power button on the front panel is pressed the blue indicator light momentarily flashes and that "relay" clicks again then the light goes out. Removing the side panel I notice the fans also "kick" over when the front panel button is pressed. The machine did not come with any memory or a hard drive but I don't think that would cause this symptom based on similar problems with PCs. I would guess there is either a short on one of the components ie logic board CPUs etc or there is a fault with the power supply. Has anyone had a similar experience with your G5s?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by junt

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Member Avatar for Cq88

I have a power mac G5 duel 2.7 with 3.5 GB of ram. I had a problem close to when I got where it would power up but the screen would not turn on and the machine was labelled "host down" when pinged meaning it was pretty dead :p. Any way after changing mother board, graphics card, 2 screens it turned out to be the power adapter for the screen.

The clicking sound you describe is normal when you give a powermac power. If it is repetitive then that is a concern.

I recommend that you swap parts that you think might be faulty and follow the general process of fault finding.

Hope this helps :)

Member Avatar for junt

First and foremost your systems does not turn on if you don't have any memory and thats for starters it may turn on without any drive but it wont really turn on if it does not have any memory on it and it will beep on its speakers if it has no memory and you must see to it that the memory you put on must be supported, good day!

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