Mac Mini 2012 i7 - worth redoing the heatsink compound?

I did change it and it made a few degrees difference. Biggest impact was that the temperature did more "even" out rather than wide fluctuations. You'll get more result by increasing the idle fan speed.

In the last few days I read that someone put his Mac mini upside down and that it made a large difference. Logic tells me that such is a good solution since the fan will be extracting the hottest air rather than the coldest air (when it is in "normal" position). I do not like the idea of the Mac mini sitting on its side but have heard favourable reports about that too.

valdigre said:

Could I ask those of you who reapplied thermal compounds on their 2012 i7 minis to report their load temperatures (Boinc, handbrakebetc)?

I put Prolinatech pk-2 to my 2.6 i7, I have around 40-44 Celsius when idle (room 20 degrees) but under load, handbrake or Boinc, I get to around 98-105 !!!

I thought changing paste would lower load temp but either it does not or I applied too little paste?

Click to expand...

I have Tuniq TX-4 on my 2.6 i7.

Idle: 45-50 (but my room is a few degrees hotter than yours and I idle with a few programs running)

Peak CPU: With Handbrake coding a 30GB mkv my mini would hit 102-105 on the stock OEM paste but on Tuniq I get 95-102. Generally it sits around 98.

Also put the mini in a side stand. I use the Newer Tech alloy stand. That should give you a few degrees as well.

I also find most thermal pastes work better after a week or so of curing, even though most say there is no curing time. Although Arctic Silver 5 is clear about the 200 hour curing time.

As for the amount of paste I applied, I put about 3mm diameter ball (or drop) in size on the gpu in the middle, and a thin line about 2mm wide along the center length of the cpu that stops about 2mm before the ends. You can see if there is over flow ( or too much) by shining an led torch in between the heat sink and logic board when you have it out. It is not the easiest to see the CPU but the GPU is clearly visible when looking from the sides with a torch.

I also find the 'shining the torch' method is good to do before you apply the paste to see how well the heat sink sits on the processors. Be careful not to scratch. The mac mini heat sink is notoriously fitting and is not a marvel of machining like most of Apple's manufacturing. If it is fitting badly or you can see a gap or an angle then you may need a little more paste. That is why I find Tuniq TX-4 is good because it is not so runny (it's thick relatively speaking) and works well with badly fitting heat sinks. For the same reason that the sink is badly fitting I do not spread the paste (even though Tuniq says to) and instead use the bead or line method.

Thanks for your detailed information, mate!

I have basically the same results, more or less.

What I am doing now is running Boinc at 25% CPU usage (every 4th second processing), all 8 threads running and the average temperature is hovering at 82 degrees on average.

What I will do is take the side cover off when my 120 mm usb fan arrives and point it to the opened cover. I will add an air filter to it and try to buy or make a tunnel for the fan and cover hole, to tightly fill in the gaps, so that air only reaches the inside of mini from the fan.

Will report back in a couple of days.

valdigre said:

Thanks for your detailed information, mate!

I have basically the same results, more or less.

What I am doing now is running Boinc at 25% CPU usage (every 4th second processing), all 8 threads running and the average temperature is hovering at 82 degrees on average.

What I will do is take the side cover off when my 120 mm usb fan arrives and point it to the opened cover. I will add an air filter to it and try to buy or make a tunnel for the fan and cover hole, to tightly fill in the gaps, so that air only reaches the inside of mini from the fan.

Will report back in a couple of days.

Click to expand...

You might be interested in this post. Remember though it was done before we accepted the new norm in temps for mac minis. Although I guess he actually established what the norm is by his very post.

Whilst not in the habit of soliciting anyone's services on the forum without permission, I suggest you see philipma's posts on the heat of mac minis as he has done a lot of work on this from what I have read.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1487234/

That is some very interesting Reading.

What he did was put his mini horizontally on top of a laptop cooler.

What I intend to do is leave my mini on the side as it stands, remove the side cover and attach a 120 mm fan with a tunel to it, so it supplies internals and the blower with cool, filtered air.

We shall see how it works, I do not care about aesthetics but peace of mind.
Having 100 degrees Celsius on full use is just unacceptable for me...

I will create a separate post with results.

Ok, so let me just share quickly my findings with you guys.

I bought a decent USB 120 mm fan, which produces around 97 cfm flow.
I removed side cover of mini, put an air filter around the side of cover, where the hole was, and pointed the fan into it.

Results are dissapointing, while idle temp decreased by some 4-5 degrees Celsius, using full 8 threads in Boinc would still produce 100-105 degrees celsius, maybe with a bit lower rpms of the system fan.

Other experiments showed similar findings- the most stressing tasks for the CPU will still result in the maxed out temperatures, but maybe with lower RPM's.

Part of the problem may be how the RPM's of the fan are controlled, it seams, that the software around it will allow for this high temperatures, so without proper control of that, there is nothing we can do.

Anyway, I put the cover back on and pointed the external fan too cool the case of the mini.

Will not run this small box like this with CPU around 105 degrees for extended periods of time, it is madness, but it is my opinion.

I set up Boinc to use all 8 threads but at 25% usage, which results in average temp of 82 degrees. Still high, but much more acceptable...

Over and out.

Ok, I need to clear some things up.

I was not satisfied with my temperatures at all, at full speed you would get easily 105 degrees full fan speed.

I decided to redo my paste again, this time nit using the pea size in the middle method, but applying the paste using the provided shuffle like applier (prolimatech pk-3).

I carefully smeared the CPU and GPU with a fat layer.
Now, idle, on windows 8 I get around 40-42 degrees at 21 degrees room temperature.
World community grid pushes my CPU to around 96-100 degrees tops.
Playing a game to around the same value.

Temperatures are not hiking any more.

Values are in Celsius.

My advice? Don't use the pea method for mac mini, apply your paste generously with credit card or something like that. Remember, that there is a huge hap between GPU and the heat sink, those do not touch...

valdigre said:

Ok, I need to clear some things up.

I was not satisfied with my temperatures at all, at full speed you would get easily 105 degrees full fan speed.

I decided to redo my paste again, this time nit using the pea size in the middle method, but applying the paste using the provided shuffle like applier (prolimatech pk-3).

I carefully smeared the CPU and GPU with a fat layer.
Now, idle, on windows 8 I get around 40-42 degrees at 21 degrees room temperature.
World community grid pushes my CPU to around 96-100 degrees tops.
Playing a game to around the same value.

Temperatures are not hiking any more.

Values are in Celsius.

My advice? Don't use the pea method for mac mini, apply your paste generously with credit card or something like that. Remember, that there is a huge hap between GPU and the heat sink, those do not touch...

Click to expand...

Nice drop in temps. Some peace of mind.

Yeah the gap between the GPU and sink plate is bizarre. There are spacers actually keeping the gap there. The gap seems to be a 2012 thing though from what I have seen.

I actually wondered if the gap was meant to be there perhaps to limit the heat transference of the super hot CPU back into the GPU. In other words because the CPU and GPU use the same sink, the CPU heat could transfer along the heat sink spine into the GPU. So the gap may limit this.

Purely guessing though.

Anyway, unless you dismantle minis my post makes no sense.

benwiggy said:

Macs are coming out of the factory in a sub-standard or defective condition.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, they actually are (coming from the factory in defective condition).
I've token apart mine '12 mini (i7 2,6) when added the SSD, and found same ~1-1.2mm (actually HUGE for such a case) gap between afore mentioned "GPU", which is in fact the North-bridge for Intel chipset, and combined heatsink. I have also found the heatsink contact surface roughly finished, very far from somewhat polished state, as it must be for better heat conduction. The fewer the paste, the better the cooling performance – that is self-evident.
So, i have bent the heatsink the way, it hadn't any visible gaps between it's surfaces and corresponding chips (CPU / North-bridge), polished it's surface and applied the very thin layer of Arctic Silver 4 paste. Finally got my mini's temps some 12-15 C lower under 2-3 minutes full load, and have only seen the fan working on it's full speed under really hard-to-calculate tasks, like several simultaneous multithreaded video conversion routines, ran for 30-150 minutes.
So finally for me it is obviously worth it.

Does OWC re-do thermal paste?

Ice Dragon said:

Does OWC re-do thermal paste?

Click to expand...

When?

driveparty said:

.....
So, i have bent the heatsink the way, it hadn't any visible gaps between it's surfaces and corresponding chips (CPU / North-bridge), polished it's surface and applied the very thin layer of Arctic Silver 4 paste. Finally got my mini's temps some 12-15 C lower under 2-3 minutes full load, .....

Click to expand...

Congrats, I did not achieve comparable results on my mid 2011 Mac mini.

What is the fluctuation of the temperature like (I prefer to use HWmonitor under Windows) when the 2012 model is compared to the 2011 model?

I my case (both base models and no replacement of the thermal paste) I find that the 2012 model fluctuates 8 - 12 C (often within half a second or so up and down both ways) while the 2011 is more like 3 - 5 C under same loading conditions. I would be keen to find out if that temperature swing has settled down a lot or not. Thanks.

Just bought the 2012 Mac mini 2.3 i7 I think it runs seriously high. Playing steam games I can hear the fan kick in high, and when I look to see the temp its at 200°F at times. Sometimes I look and see 160- 170°F. I think that's a bit hot don't you? So whats a safe temperature for the 2012 mac mini, and whats you're about to fry your CPU temp? Does anyone know?

eljanitor said:

I think that's a bit hot don't you?

Click to expand...

Hardware runs better, if we think higher temperatures are not ok? Why?

eljanitor said:

So whats a safe temperature for the 2012 mac mini...? Does anyone know?

Click to expand...

The temperatures are fine as long as you can read the CPU/iGPU temperature via GUI-based tools on a display. That's a sign the integrated GPU works and has no problems with heat.

eljanitor said:

Just bought the 2012 Mac mini 2.3 i7 I think it runs seriously high. Playing steam games I can hear the fan kick in high, and when I look to see the temp its at 200°F at times. Sometimes I look and see 160- 170°F. I think that's a bit hot don't you? So whats a safe temperature for the 2012 mac mini, and whats you're about to fry your CPU temp? Does anyone know?

Click to expand...

Those are normal mac mini temps. They are totally fine. 200F is 94C from memory. My i7 2.6GHz peaks at 100C when the CPU is maxed out. Most people I know run at that temp too. They are built to handle that temp.

There are a lot of threads on heat issue. The issue has been beaten to death with very minimal (none I remember) threads on minis falling dead from heat stress.

Philipma (forum member) did a lot of work/tests on this around December 2012.

I have run an i7 2.0GHz 24/7 for over two years and regularly run it at 100% CPU. It is just fine.

Stay cool.