Hello all,
Not posted on these forums before but have used them for information in my project to see just how for a Mac Mini 1,1 could be pushed and upgraded. I have now completed my upgrades so wanted to share my results for others to know what these older Mac Minis are capable of.
I won't be covering in-depth steps taken as these are already on the forum and google but have summarised what was needed.
The mac mini in question started life with the following specs:
CPU - 1.66 GHz (T2300)
Ram - 512 MB (2 × 256 MB) of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
HDD - 80GB 5400 RPM Sata
OS - OSX 10.4.11
With the original specs I was surprised it was ever an active machine as it was an absolute dog when it came to even the most basic of web browsing and took an age just to boot.
The plan was simple:
Max the ram out to 4GB (3GB usable, limited by chipset)
Max the processor out to Intel core 2 duo T7600 (2.33Ghz)
Max the internal SATA interface with an SSD
Upgrade to the most current OS possible
To to the above I had to overcome a few limitations, these were:
1) As standard my mac mini came with firmware 1,1 which is limited to 2GB of RAM. Using online sources I was able to force an upgrade to firmware 1,2 which allows 4GB of ram to be installed.
2) Upgrading to OSX 10.6 was easy once the ram was upgraded, I have since upgraded to OSX 10.7 which involved using a 2nd mac in target disk mode to trick the installer into continuing on the mac mini's unsupported hardware and then modify the .plist file to get it to boot and also again after major system software updates.
3) Apple does not support TRIM on non-apple SSD's as standard, I used a tool called 'Trim enabler' to enable this feature for my SSD to get maximum speed from it.
With the above limitations overcome I now have a mac mini with the following specifications, and it has cost me £100 for the mac mini and then £200 on parts for a total of £300:
CPU - INTEL CORE 2 DUO T7600 (2.33Ghz)
Ram - Samsung DDR2 RAM 800MHz PC2-6400 (running at 667Mhz by limitations of motherboard)
HDD - 120GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD
OS - OSX 10.7.5
Benchmarks for this set-up are below. Note that the HDD is limited to 1.5 Gbit/s by the mac mini, the chip-set is apparently capable of 3.0 Gbit/s but I have not found a way to unlock this. Also to note is that initially I upgraded to OSX 10.6 and under this the HDD had read speeds 10mbps faster, so looks like OSX 10.7 may be slowing it down a little.
I now have a mac that boots up from cold in under 20 seconds and loads any applications within two bounces of the dock icon. It did boot and run a bit faster under 10.6 versus 10.7 but I wanted the most up to date version I could fit on, unfortunately due to hardware limits it seems 10.8 is not an option.
The mac mini does suffer a bit with the menu animations under 10.7 but not enough to affect day to day use, under 10.6 it was perfect. The only task I have found it a bit lacking in is 1080p 60fps video encoding, this takes quite a while to complete but I'm unsure if it's limited by the on-board graphics or not. I know the CPU only runs at 50% usage due to iMovie running as a 32-bit process (10.7 itself runs 64-bit no problem), so it may be faster when/if iMovie ever goes 64-bit.
Anyway, all I can really say is that the Mac mini really is a very capable and upgradable machine if you are willing to get your hands dirty. I would say OSX 10.6 is it's natural limit but it will run 10.7 well 90% of the time and even with 4GB of ram (3GB usable) is able to run VMware fusion and windows VMs without too much slowdown. Any questions let me know.
Benchmark results (under 10.7):
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Not posted on these forums before but have used them for information in my project to see just how for a Mac Mini 1,1 could be pushed and upgraded. I have now completed my upgrades so wanted to share my results for others to know what these older Mac Minis are capable of.
I won't be covering in-depth steps taken as these are already on the forum and google but have summarised what was needed.
The mac mini in question started life with the following specs:
CPU - 1.66 GHz (T2300)
Ram - 512 MB (2 × 256 MB) of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
HDD - 80GB 5400 RPM Sata
OS - OSX 10.4.11
With the original specs I was surprised it was ever an active machine as it was an absolute dog when it came to even the most basic of web browsing and took an age just to boot.
The plan was simple:
Max the ram out to 4GB (3GB usable, limited by chipset)
Max the processor out to Intel core 2 duo T7600 (2.33Ghz)
Max the internal SATA interface with an SSD
Upgrade to the most current OS possible
To to the above I had to overcome a few limitations, these were:
1) As standard my mac mini came with firmware 1,1 which is limited to 2GB of RAM. Using online sources I was able to force an upgrade to firmware 1,2 which allows 4GB of ram to be installed.
2) Upgrading to OSX 10.6 was easy once the ram was upgraded, I have since upgraded to OSX 10.7 which involved using a 2nd mac in target disk mode to trick the installer into continuing on the mac mini's unsupported hardware and then modify the .plist file to get it to boot and also again after major system software updates.
3) Apple does not support TRIM on non-apple SSD's as standard, I used a tool called 'Trim enabler' to enable this feature for my SSD to get maximum speed from it.
With the above limitations overcome I now have a mac mini with the following specifications, and it has cost me £100 for the mac mini and then £200 on parts for a total of £300:
CPU - INTEL CORE 2 DUO T7600 (2.33Ghz)
Ram - Samsung DDR2 RAM 800MHz PC2-6400 (running at 667Mhz by limitations of motherboard)
HDD - 120GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD
OS - OSX 10.7.5
Benchmarks for this set-up are below. Note that the HDD is limited to 1.5 Gbit/s by the mac mini, the chip-set is apparently capable of 3.0 Gbit/s but I have not found a way to unlock this. Also to note is that initially I upgraded to OSX 10.6 and under this the HDD had read speeds 10mbps faster, so looks like OSX 10.7 may be slowing it down a little.
I now have a mac that boots up from cold in under 20 seconds and loads any applications within two bounces of the dock icon. It did boot and run a bit faster under 10.6 versus 10.7 but I wanted the most up to date version I could fit on, unfortunately due to hardware limits it seems 10.8 is not an option.
The mac mini does suffer a bit with the menu animations under 10.7 but not enough to affect day to day use, under 10.6 it was perfect. The only task I have found it a bit lacking in is 1080p 60fps video encoding, this takes quite a while to complete but I'm unsure if it's limited by the on-board graphics or not. I know the CPU only runs at 50% usage due to iMovie running as a 32-bit process (10.7 itself runs 64-bit no problem), so it may be faster when/if iMovie ever goes 64-bit.
Anyway, all I can really say is that the Mac mini really is a very capable and upgradable machine if you are willing to get your hands dirty. I would say OSX 10.6 is it's natural limit but it will run 10.7 well 90% of the time and even with 4GB of ram (3GB usable) is able to run VMware fusion and windows VMs without too much slowdown. Any questions let me know.
Benchmark results (under 10.7):
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