2011 i5 2.5 mac mini + pixelated screen and crashes

progressive failure from overheating

Hi, You are seeing progressive failure from overheating the machine a while back. I had/have the same macmini5,2. I ran it pretty hard and the fan really cranked up but I figured Apple knows what they are doing. Not! One day in light use the machine froze. When I rebooted I got the white screen of death. I took it in to a local repair shop that I trust because you have to wait a week for a genius bar appointment. The tech reset the pram, checked the disk and did some other things like exchanging the memory cards. Each time the machine would power up and we could log in, but the white screen of death came earlier and earlier. Last time the cursor turned into the green-yellow-red horizontal lines and the screen got black horizontal stripes. Burned out graphics chip. A new logic board from Apple costs $409 plus maybe $100 to have your tech install it. So you might as well buy a new used machine on Ebay. The problem is the case is too small to properly cool the chips with fans and heat sinks. The macmini5,2 is the last one with a separate not-intel graphics system. My guess that chip is not cooled with the cpu.

Pls let me no

Hi deano, Please let me know if you have fixed your problem! I may try that with mine.

deano59 said:

Hi - I swapped out the ram - had 8gb in there and went back to the original 4gb that came with it - didn't make a difference yesterday but - turns out It seems to work flawlessly today - fingers crossed it's just a ram issue - what do you think?

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I think not! Are you certain that the problem persisted after you changed the RAM but afterward it improved overnight? If your RAM caused the problem then changing it should have solved the problem right away.

grcar said:

Hi deano, Please let me know if you have fixed your problem! I may try that with mine.

Click to expand...

Always check the RAM. It seems to fail more than people realize.

Same thing just started happening to mine. It always ran hot, over 200f and the fans would come on at the drop of a hat full blast. I firmly believe it overheated... two hard drives and that Radeon in that tiny case was too much for the cooling system .

Anyway, screen comes on with wide vertical lines, it gets partway through booting and either just sits there are restarts itself. I was quoted $549 for the motherboard from a friend who runs an Apple Authorized repair shop, so that isn't an option.

I don't like my options for replacing it. I can either pick up an open boxed 1.4ghz 2014 model at Microcenter for $339, or try my luck on craigslist and attempt to find a 2012 model.

two hard drives and that Radeon in that tiny case was too much for the cooling system .