Surprising; never knew anyone whose G5s died on them (the systems, sure, but not the CPUs). My dual '04 cpus are still chugging along just fine.

The hotter running G5s had liquid cooling that would inevitably leak and corrode everything.

I'm pretty sure they have a wiskers or wire bonding problem too, and the water blocks clog.

I picked one up that was labeled "crashes while booting" or some such from the goodwill near my house for something like $20 some years back. Brought it home, and noticed that the water block got burning hot when it was turned on, and tubes feeding the radiator were room temp. I broke the water loop open and flushed it out, and a whole bunch of white crap came out of the block. So, whatever the coolant apple shipped with it, was clogging the block. Reassembled the whole thing, had a terrible time getting the air of the system, but in the end it ran pretty good for a while until I left it off for a few months, and it refused to boot. In an act of desperation I hit it with the heat gun and that magically fixed it for a few weeks, and it did the same thing like a year later when I tried to boot it again.

I ran some benchmarks on it to compare with a POWER4 I also have, and yah lots of clock, shitty IPC. It was really cool in 2001, but by the time apple was putting them in mac's they were pretty terrible in comparison to the amd/intel's.

For us non Apple users, how is that possible? I don't think I've ever had a CPU die other than by lightning.

I don't know what OP was running but the G5 iMacs were some of the machines suffering from the early 2000s capacitor plague[0]. The power supplies and power regulation on the logic boards would die on those all the time. If you were lucky it was just the power supply but the problem usually needed a PSU and logic board swap.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/culture/pcs-plagued-by-bad-capacitors/

The processor in a G5 PowerMac came on a card that had the VRMs, capacitors, and a bunch of other stuff on it. It was basically like a tiny motherboard that attached to your motherboard.

I was imagining lightning struck the cpu specifically, leaving the rest intact? Quite the precision.

Oh no, the last time this happened there were definitely other casualties. The motherboard was left in a particular state of undeath, where it wouldn't quite power on. But if you jumped the ATX header it'd sort of attempt to boot and give some beeps.

After that I added a bunch of grounding to my house and I haven't had that much damage in one lightning strike before.

If I remember correctly it didn't have the biendian capability of the G4 so Virtual PC wouldn't run.

Virtual PC for Mac did get an update to run on the G5.

Yeah, but it had some performance issues. The 970 was such a bummer. I read the book The Race for a New Game Machine, and the crap show around Apple, the 970, and especially the Cell was just so infuriating.