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My Mac Pro is 3 years old. I think it is old enough for a regular PC. Mac Pro is designed for easy servicing. Unlike many recent Apple products, which has no user serviceable parts (including battery!), Mac Pro seems like designed to be maintained very easily. Opening the case is very trivial. Replacing hard disks was like joke; they are on racks. I struggled a little with the graphics card and finally removed it (the small "thing" at the end of PCIe slot confused me (by the way, all 4 of my hard disk racks are full now). I still don't remember which way I pushed it, but I've got the card removed safely. My current apartment, for some rather peculiar reason, has almost no dust at all! But last few apartments we've lived had/collected a lot of dust around the case. After gently removing graphics card, I have removed the top cover (the metal casing covering entire aluminum heat sink and fan) and cleaned the dust around it. Also sprayed grease into GPU fan.

I also remember my memory banks were too hot, like around 80 degrees Celsius. I thought there may be something wrong either with the fan right next to memory banks or with the heat sinks attached to DIMMs. Using vacuum cleaner at low speed and reversing from air intake to output, I managed to clean a lot of dirt off from the fans and heat sinks.

I then removed the aluminum/plastic cage surrounding memory slots and then removed the CPU heat sinks' cover. Then used the same technique for cleaning the dust. It appears like CPU heat sink and fan did not collect as much dirt. I then removed the casing at the bottom completely and used vacuum cleaner to suck all dirt, at low speed.

It's now power supply's turn... I have removed DVD rack, very easily, and the BSD hard disk (IDE) then reached power supply fan. I've first used vacuum cleaner to suck all the dirt, then inverted it and applied air from rear of the casing and therefore all dust dropped into the DVD bay (which was empty).

After some cleaning, I think my Mac Pro shines better than before and makes almost no noise again!

After I've bought Mac Pro, I've mentioned how silent it is to one of my colleagues and he, as an old-timer, said "they use wide fans". That is, radius of fans is larger than normal PCs. They probably can do better air intake than regular PC power supplies or CPU coolers at lower revolutions (lower speed).

On Mac Pro, we have aluminum heat sink "towers", probably around 8 inches tall, on top of CPUs and then there is a fan at the front of the case, instead of fan for each CPU. This makes much less noise. My CPU temperature is around 27-30 degrees Celsius on idle (ambient is around 22 I think). When I use all CPUs, temperature increases up to 50-56 degrees and does not seem like to exceed it (or, Mac Pro's fans kick in very early and stabilize temperature around it).

I like Mac Pro's casing; very easy maintenance, very silent (after cleanup of course ) and very "cool" for semiconductors to survive.