Went into my local Apple reseller here in Colorado Springs, and I had a chance to play with their demo G5 unit after hours. I won't speak much of the peformance (as it simply creams my G4 500 Cube), but instead the overall quietness of the machine. When I was working on it, this was the only machine on in the store, and ambient noise was low. The machine was noticible sitting on the counter, but just barley. The cooling system does it's job well, and even when I pushed the processor for 5 minutes with Distributed.net, the machine still remained at the same noise level. For those worried about the noise this box might make, don't. I dare say a stock Cube with the original noisy Maxtor drive was about the same as this box.
Also, regarding the heat. Many people here believe a G5 Powerbook is a long ways off because of the size of the G5 heatsink. After seeing the unit up close, I don't believe this to be true. Yes, the heatsink is massive, but this seems to be part of the effort to quiet the machine down. They do so by using a large fan that can spin slower, making less noise. But because it is able to move air over a larger area, it cools quieter then a smaller heatsink and fan could. I personally still thing the G5 Poerbooks will wait on the G5 to move to 0.09 micron process, but I don't think it will take much longer after IBM makes those chips for users to have G5 power to go.
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