Recently I came into posession of a few Apple Xserves. The one in question today is an Xserve G5, RackMac3,1, which was built when Apple at the top—and bottom—of it's PowerPC era.



This isn't the first Xserve—that honor belongs to the G41. And it wasn't the last—there were a few generations of Intel Xeon-powered RackMacs that followed. But in my opinion, it was the most interesting.
Unfortunately, being manufactured in 2004, this Mac's Delta power supply suffers from the Capacitor Plague. The PSU tends to run hot, and some of the capacitors weren't even 105°C-rated, so they tend to wear out, especially if the Xserve was running high-end workloads.

Jeff Geerling is a software developer, author, and open-source contributor known for his expertise in infrastructure automation and Drupal development. Readers can learn about DevOps practices, Ansible automation, and web development with Drupal. With blog posts, tutorials, and open-source projects, Jeff Geerling shares  insights and best practices for building and managing web infrastructure.

Jeff Geerling

A hands-on restoration of an Apple Xserve G5 (RackMac3,1) from 2004, covering PSU recapping to fix capacitor plague, SATA drive compatibility quirks, power consumption (~140W idle), noise levels, and installing Mac OS X Server 10.3. The post also explores the machine's unique hardware features like its worm-gear drive lock and DB9 serial console port, with a future goal of using it as a GPS-based precision time server.

Restoring an Xserve G5: When Apple built real servers