Mac mini and conductonaut

[millar876]

My poor old Mac mini (late 2012 2.3GHz i7) is playing up! It’s taking an age to start up, and generally being (a lot) slower than it used to be. Noticed it a few months ago when I filled up my hard drive! So I had a dig around and managed to free up around 300GB by moving to externals and deleting duplicates, and it’s getting really hot doing not a lot. So, I’ve been monitoring temps, and whilst it seems to be within limits it never reaches the 3.3GHz boost. It gets to 3.0 then hits 105 deg C the fans kick in to full tilt and core speed goes down to 2.4-2.5, I know that’s still better than base. What I was thinking was, get a dual drive kit and use command line to make a fusion drive with my 1TB spinner and a 120GB SSD and whilst I’m in at the guts, replace the TIM with thermal Grizly conductonaut liquid metal. The heat sink seems to have copper pads and heat pipes with aluminium plate and fins. Should be ok to use the liquid metal if I paint a layer of insulator (clear nail polish or laqer) over the aluminium plate and keep the LM on the die. I’d love to go full SSD but can’t justify spending around £400 on one for a 6 year old Mac mini. Hopefully there’s a new one soon. I’d like thoughts on this plan? Has anyone else done similar?

 

[Boyd01]

Don't know anything about the issues you raise, but I have 2012 2.6ghz quad Mini that runs like a champ. It has the original Apple 256gb SSD as the only internal drive. When I was shopping for this machine two years ago, I chose one that only had an original Apple SSD because I thought it would be better to have more empty space inside the computer and no mechanical hard drive. I also wanted one that hadn't been opened up and messed with by a do-it-yourselfer.

I am now booting it from a 1TB external USB 3.0 Samsung T3 SSD (I still have Mountain Lion on the internal SSD). This works really well and is not a whole lot slower than the original SSD. So maybe you could remove the internal hard drive and use an external SSD? Here's what I get with the T3

 

[millar876]

i did think of something similar but i use it as a media server so I'm using all the usb ports for the 16TB of external drive space. and theres even a fw800 drive in there as well. and I'm using the thunderbolt port to drive an ultrawide 2560x1080 display. i think i may be at peripheral saturation point with it, 3xUSB3 external drives, 3x USB2 drives, USB 3 hub, USB 2 Hub, Xrite display calibrator, 30 pin dock connector (kids iPad) lightning cable (everything else), a firewire 800 drive, a firewire isight camera, Firewire hub Mini DP and HDMI, Cat6, audio in and out all plugged in.

 

[Boyd01]

i think i may be at peripheral saturation point with it.

LOL, I'd say that you are. You are obviously pounding on that Mini a lot harder than I do. My quad is dedicated to video/audio editing, with the external SSD, two 5tb disks, USB audio interface, a DVCAM/HDV deck on firewire and BlackMagic ultrastudio on thunderbolt, connected to a Sony production monitor. It has periods of intensive use but then might just sit, powered down for a month or more. Am hoping to keep it going like this for another year or two. I have a 2014 base mini as a media server. It runs 24/7 but the only peripherals are two 4tb drives.

 

[teksurv]

I prefer to use Kryonaut on these machines and have done so with great results. You might also look at the fan, it may be clogged reducing performance.

 

[bplein]

I prefer to use Kryonaut on these machines and have done so with great results. You might also look at the fan, it may be clogged reducing performance.

This! The system getting hot has little to do with a hard drive filling up (yes, it can work harder if it's fragmented, so there's some correlation).

There are 2 main components that produce a fair amount of heat, the CPU and the HDD when it's busy.

So I'd look to see if the system is using CPU when you think it is idle, and to see if the HDD is busy when you think it is idle. Activity Monitor can help but I like "iostat -w 1 -n 7" to monitor individual disk activity.

Assuming both of those ARE idle or nearly idle, look at the fan/cooling. Is the heatsink or fan clogged?

You can run a fan control system to boost the fan speeds but that's a bandage to cover up other issues. I use TG Pro (paid app) and it gives you great insight to the temperatures on every possible temp probe in the system... maybe that (or another tool) can pinpoint the exact component that is heating up your system abnormally.

Good luck!

 

[millar876]

my internal drive has the OS, apps, and iTunes and photos library,and that’s about it. It’s a very big iTunes library, and I don’t really want Apple Music, due to large local content and iTunes Match does me fine. Most is on the externals. As for the fans, I take the cover off every couple of months and give it a blast with compressed air ( aerosol can) and looks fairly clean. If Apple could kindly get their finger out and just release a new one with modern internals, that’d be great, my 2012 quad i7 out performs all the 2014 mini BTO options.

 

[millar876]

So I’ve went from the above to a full strip and refurb. 1TB Seagate barracuda 7200rpm HDD 7mm 2.5” HDD and 120GB WD green SSD for making a fusion drive, new PRAM battery, ifixit Mac mini dual drive kit, and some new thermal paste ordered.

 

[millar876]

Well... the upgrades are done. hardware wise, not too difficult a job. I replaced the PRAM battery, fitted a WD Green 120GB SSD and a seagate barracuda 7200rpm HDD using a dual drive kit from ifixit, gave it a good clean with an air duster, removed the rock like stock thermal paste. i only used the liquid metal on the i7, as it had a copper contact plate on the heat sync, the platform controller had an aluminium contact plate so i used Kryonaut paste for that.
[doublepost=1529471182][/doublepost]i had a few issues when it came to installing and restoring. the USB stick i made seemed to be missing a file required for installation. it would boot to the stick as normal but once it transferred to the fusion drive it got stuck in a loop looking for a file that was missing or corrupted, so i had to repo the kids iMac and use firewire target disk mode and its restore partition to re-install mac OS 10.13. also to restore from a time machine backup was unfeasibly long, over 30 hours, so i whipped out an old external drive caddy and restored from the original HDD (about 6 hours)
[doublepost=1529471609][/doublepost]

[doublepost=1529472724][/doublepost]i put sone clear nail varnish over the resisters on the CPU to protect against overspill.
the liquid metal is definitely doing its job, it’s now hitting full boost speed and staying there at a lower temperature and lower fan speed. Fusion drive gives a noticeable bump to performance as well. Full boost maintained at 95c (fan at 90% cpu usage 100%) idle 63c (fan inaudible usage 4-8%) well within spec for that chip. Previously at 100% chip was at 105c where it would start throttling with fan at 100% i think overall power consumption has dropped but i can't remember what it was before All in all a good improvement

full load with handbrake after about 5 mins

full load with handbrake for first 5 mins until heat saturation of heat sync

about 1 min after i stopped handbrake encode

 

[jalyst]

and replace the TIM with thermal Grizly conductonaut liquid metal. The heat sink seems to have copper pads and heat pipes with aluminium plate and fins. Should be ok to use the liquid metal if I paint a layer of insulator (clear nail polish or laqer) over the aluminium plate and keep the LM on the die

Anyone know if the 2018 Mac Mini is much the same, or perhaps entirely Copper/Nickel?
I'm wanting to use Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut or similar...
I hope the entire heatsink complex isn't Alu, if it is Conductonaut/Similar will be a no go.

Apologies for the necro, looked everywhere & for the life of me can't find the info. anywhere!

 

[FreelancerJ]

Well... the upgrades are done. hardware wise, not too difficult a job.

Hey, sorry to necro-thread, but you're the first I've found who has actually gone through with the Conductonaut on a 2012 after flossing the idea. I'm curious how that system is going since then?
(I'm also really appreciating that you actually set up a ESD-safe workspace, I cringe so hard every time I see people posing with PCBs on their wooden desks or the shipping boxes)

I'll be throwing a second drive in in a couple months and it's definitely due a refresh of the thermal paste, so I'm curious if the liquid metal is a good mid-long term solution on that front.
I'm actually not sure how it's doing thermally, because I have it in a enclosed shelf space with a drobo, and I built a fan in to the back to pull the warm air out the back from the disks which runs all the time. But I'm in the middle of transferring all the server stuff it runs in the background to a new system since I hit the limit of what I can queue it up doing and still perform as a desktop computer, so once that's all off and it's just back to being for active use I was planning to benchmark it without the bonus airflow before the refresh

 

[millar876]

Sorry it took so long to reply. I sold the system a good while ago so I can’t tell you how it’s still doing, but I used it 24/7 as a Plex server and my main mac for around 12 months and the temps stayed consistent. I was monitoring them with intel power gadget.

 

[FreelancerJ]

Thanks for coming back, good to hear it cruised along well afterwards. I’ll be having a couple weeks downtime in May so I’ll probably get the tune up done then.
I should probably record what’s it’s like ahead of time for comparison, so I can see if there’s much of a difference. I assume it’ll mostly be down to a bit less fan operation or lower temps on the ambient sensors since Apple’s power management usually pushes these systems to whatever they can do within their thermal envelope.