Mac mini (2018) RAM Upgrade

[Neodym]

Older iMacs sometimes have display issues (washed out colors, cloudy areas etc.) from the heat of all the internal components. Some older iMacs also had issues with dust having crept behind the glass. Did you check the iMac forum here at MacRumors?

For the heat issue alone I feel that a mini is the better option (next to allowing free choice of monitor brand, size, curved etc.). On my 2012 i7 mini (upgraded to 16GB Ram) I could drive an UWQHD monitor (i.e. 3440x1440) via Thunderbolt together with a FullHD monitor via HDMI without stuttering.

And if it’s harder to find a good offer for a mini (as you say), that may be because others see it similarly ;-)

Just not clear to me: Which mini does your wife use? As you mentioned a 2010 iMac, I assumed your wife may be on a 2010/2011/2012 mini. If that’s the case, it may be sufficient to upgrade it to an SSD to eliminate the stutter. If she’s using a 2018 base mini, try to avoid scaled resolutions to reduce the probability of stutter.

 

[pshufd]

Older iMacs sometimes have display issues (washed out colors, cloudy areas etc.) from the heat of all the internal components. Some older iMacs also had issues with dust having crept behind the glass. Did you check the iMac forum here at MacRumors?

For the heat issue alone I feel that a mini is the better option (next to allowing free choice of monitor brand, size, curved etc.). On my 2012 i7 mini (upgraded to 16GB Ram) I could drive an UWQHD monitor (i.e. 3440x1440) via Thunderbolt together with a FullHD monitor via HDMI without stuttering.

And if it’s harder to find a good offer for a mini (as you say), that may be because others see it similarly ;-)

Just not clear to me: Which mini does your wife use? As you mentioned a 2010 iMac, I assumed your wife may be on a 2010/2011/2012 mini. If that’s the case, it may be sufficient to upgrade it to an SSD to eliminate the stutter. If she’s using a 2018 base mini, try to avoid scaled resolutions to reduce the probability of stutter.

I went down to look at it yesterday. It had a white screen, folder with a question mark. I tried Recovery Mode but no luck. I took out a bootable High Sierra drive and got it up and running. It was a Core i7, 8 GB RAM and a 1 TB HDD but it appears that it was formatted and an operating system wasn't installed. This iMac was in great cosmetic shape. I got it home and played around with it and noticed that the fans were noisy. So I vacuumed out the vents but that didn't do anything. I installed Macs Fan Control and found that all of the temperature sensors were all within acceptable ranges so I started playing with the fan controls. I found out that the HDD fan was generating the noise and just set the fan speed to the lowest speed, 1,100 RPMs. The actual HDD temperature was 34 degrees and it was dismounted. So it looks like the thermal sensor on the HDD was bad.

Not surprised that they wanted to sell it so cheap ($100). Dog slow with an HDD and the fans making a lot of noise.

I ordered 16 GB of DDR3 1600 and it will arrive on Tuesday. The iMac is sitting on my desk right now next to the Late 2014 iMac i7 I bought three weeks ago. I am considering selling my M1 mini 16/1 or giving it to my wife as the two iMacs together can take care of my office needs better than the M1 mini. The combined Geekbench 5 of the iMacs is 6,000 and it's about 7,400 for the M1 mini. But the iMacs have discrete GPUs that have more horsepower than the mini. So $600 for 5k monitor + QHD monitor + 2 sets of great speakers, 24 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD compared to $1,649 for M1 mini with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, and a 4k monitor.

My main metric for value is Geekbench 5 multicore score divided by price. The 2010 iMac score is 22.45. The 2014 iMac score is 7.54. The M1 mini is 6.73. The mini doesn't include display and speakers, though, so the mini value is typically much higher than MacBooks and iMacs.

Yeah, there are risks in buying old hardware but there are some great deals to be had out there if you know what you want, understand the value of the deals and are handy with computer tools.

 

[Neodym]

But the iMacs have discrete GPUs that have more horsepower than the mini.

Apple's discrete GPU solutions in the past were notorious for overheating, so I wish you the best of luck!

 

[pshufd]

Apple's discrete GPU solutions in the past were notorious for overheating, so I wish you the best of luck!

More of a problem with notebooks than iMacs though I think that there was one notorious year on iMacs. The thing is that if they've made it this far, they'll probably just keep on going. That is the models with fragile GPUs would have died by now.

 

[Zeebedy]

Looking to finally order the ram, would this kit be compatible?

 

[revboss]

Question: Are the rubber guards really necessary? I just couldn't get them back on the new RAM, so I left them off. Will I regret that?

 

[watakoola]

Possibly...