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DIY Mac mini Overclocking
mirko writes "So, you wanted a 1,42GHz Mac mini but either because of some distribution woes or because of your tight budget you could just get a 1,25GHz ?
Don't worry : Leo Bodnar just found out how to overclock your machine. Of course, you'll have to open it prior to anything else but you already know how to do this."
Intel claims all their busses are "quad-pumped". Those 533mhz busses are really 133mhz.
Well, if you're just moving up the speed from 1.25 to 1.42, cooling shouldn't be an issue since they are shipping minis at the higher speed in the upgraded one.
I would bet the chips are the same core in both, but the default 1.42 chips are certified qualitywise to run at that speed. Overclocking the 1.25 chip to 1.42 should really be no big deal.
Erm, no. The warranty is never valid if YOU break it, only if it breaks because it's faulty. If YOU break it, it's insurance that comes to the rescue, maybe. :)
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Did you check the jumpers? Good luck while playing with them.
If you can build a machine on practically a single PCB, that small, with DVD-reading and CD-RW capabilities, and sell it for under $500...
If you want the same specs as a Mac mini for less, go look on eBay or a second-hand reseller (try 2ndchancepc.co.uk). The point of the Mac mini isn't to have top-of-the-line components - it's to be a usable, cheap box for your Mum or Dad to just pick up and plug in.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Good point.
I bought a 512 MB 1.25 GHz Mac Mini last week. It's been a pretty sweet little machine. iMovie works great with MiniDV video, I don't have a HDV camcorder to try HD though.
Garage Band ROCKS! 18 tracks of audio of different formats and it keeps on trucking!
I haven't tried anything harder than Warcraft 3 or Sim City 4 on it yet though.
Buy a G5 if you want high performance. The 2.5Ghz has a 1.25Ghz memory bus.
That was classic intercourse!
I want one. badly. But the Mac mini is a perfect example.. I can't justify paying 500 dollars just for an operating system.
Actually, it's not just an OS. There's word processing, presentation, photo, video editing, and music creation applications provided as well. And I hear that they even throw in a cute little computer as a bonus.
The school district that I work for has been looking for a sub $500 video editing and DVD playback solution (budgets are REALLY tight these days). How does the Mac Mini stack up (with and without overclocking it)?
You can't get one for less than $480, and that's for the 256 MB combodrive version.
I bought a 512 MB superdrive Mac Mini last week. It works great for video editing, it's actually a pretty fast little machine.
BUT... transcoding from DV to MPEG2 takes awhile. Editing and even designing the buttons and menus for the DVD image is fast as can be, but be prepared to wait *at least* an hour before the finished DVD pops out after you click the burn button.
Intel claims all their busses are "quad-pumped". Those 533mhz busses are really 133mhz.
But they still send 4 instructions per clock, versus one instruction per clock. You're not really comparing apples to apples here. If you wanted to apply the same logic, PC3200 DDR memory really only runs at 200 MHz. (Except for the fact that the 2 signals per clock make it run at a functional equivalent of 400 MHz.) Same concept.
The P4 architecture definitely has its problems, but this isn't one of them. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
This is for the electrical engineers:
Why is the MoBo blue? Is there a signifigance to the color of the board? Or did Apple just pick it because on the order sheet it was "aqua"?
That is not a question for electrical engineers. It's more of a question for marketers or fashion designers. You can make the board any color you want. There are red boards, green boards, yellow boards, black boards, blue boards, etc. It's to look nice.
Well I would assume that the 1.25 is made the same as the 1.42. I have the 1.42 myself and it runs quite cool while being extremely quiet (as long as you aren't reading a CD/DVD).
If you bump the 1.25 to 1.42 I'm sure it's fine. I wouldn't want to bump the 1.42 any higher as it's not worth voiding the warranty for the TINY speed increase and the possibilty of the case not being able to handle the increased heat.
If you check your preferences you will notice that you can block stories from the homepage on various topics, including Apple stories. Any "hardcore computer nerd" worth his salt would have noticed this immediately.
Smeghead every day of the week.
The hard drive is only 4200RPM
While a faster hard drive will give you better scrubbing performance, you don't really *need* to have a fast drive for editing DV.
The DV codec that most of us use with our camcorders is DV25, which is 25 Mbits/sec = 3.125 MB/sec.
DV editing was fine on notebooks even 4 years ago on the original "toilet seat" iBook.
I just got a mini yesterday and it runs very cool . compared to a Powerbook. The internal fan comes on when the CPU temperature reaches 55C (could even be 60C), which only happens during games or other really processor intensive applications.
Even then, the aluminum case remains room temperature (feels cool). The fan itself is very quiet. During light use (Internet, word processing) the Mini is absolutely silent and operates cool to the touch.
The Powerbook on the other hand gets almost too hot to touch when the CPU hits 55C, and the internal fan is rather noisy in comparison.
Okay, I'll feed the troll...
Darwin on an Athlon 64..... sooooo sexy.
I've got good news. It's already happened/happening.
From the Darwin FAQ:
Q. What is Darwin?
A. Darwin is a version of the BSD UNIX operating system that offers advanced networking, services such as the Apache web server, and support for both Macintosh and UNIX file systems. It was originally released in March 1999. Darwin currently runs on PowerPC-based Macintosh computers, and is being ported to Intel processor-based computers and compatible systems by the Darwin community.
It's extremely quiet because the fan is on-demand. Mine only kicks in if I'm doing heavy computation or accessing the drives extensively. And when it does kick in, it slowly ramps up to speed. When the "heat event" is over, the fan slowly fades away. My SparcStation 5 worked similarly.
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
So, that says nothing about how cool it runs, but how well it dissapates heat.
The Powerbook radiates heat through it's case, while the Mac Mini is either keeping it internaly, or venting it in a more focused manner. (exhaust fan)
Pretty Pictures!
Um, not really. If you hook up two drives to the same Firewire port and try to copy between them, then it will indeed be slower. But 400 mbits/sec is still faster than the sustained data rate of a single 7200rpm drive. Just because ATA-100 goes to 100 mbytes/sec doesn't mean your drive will go that fast. In fact, ATA-100 is that fast so you can hook up two drives.
All you lose is the burst speed of the drive cache, which doesn't help much if the OS is caching the data itself anyhow.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Really the WHOLE point of having a real OS is that the interactive stuff is interactive and the batch stuff happens when you're not lookin'...
The MacMini will NOT make a good Doom3 machine. For interactive stuff (even, gasp, light video editing!) it's fine the way it is. For long term stuff (DVD encoding), background the app and do something else (even at the same time!) Who cares if it takes 25 minutes instead of 20 minutes?
Generally, 'make DVD' is the last thing I do befor e I go to bed...it's always done by morning.
If you wanted the last oomph of power, you shouldn't have bought apple's cheapest box!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Just because they make a 1.42ghz model does not mean that a 1.25 can be overclocked to 1.42 safely from a heat perspective. One of the reasons a particular part is sold at a particular speed is power consumption. A 1.25Ghz processor is a "lower-bin" part and is sold for a cheaper price. IE the transistors in the part do not function as efficently or quickly as the higher-bin 1.42ghz model. There is a lot of different things that can make that be so, but suffice it to say that Apple is probably buying parts based on a Power Consumption spec. ie... The cheap Mac Mini's are probably being built with parts that run at 1.25Ghz @ say for arguments sake 7 watts of power consuption. They are also buying parts that run at 1.42ghz @ 7 watts of power consumption. That way their heat profile is about the same regardless of which part they use. This isn't to say that either part won't run faster, but that they will generate more heat to do so. [Higher leakage currents etc]. Therefore it is patently false that you can safely overclock a slower part just because they have a faster model. The parts used in the faster model don't run hotter, they run more efficently typically. You're results will vary because IBM/Motorolla may have labelled a part that was technically good enough to be 1.42Ghz as 1.25 just to make quota... It depends on their yeilds. Physically the chips are made the same, higher speed chips just come from the center of the wafer while slower typically come from the edges, but in practice it's probabilistic thing and you may get a faster chip just because they didn't fully test the chip for fastest speed or that they needed more 1.25ghz chips then 1.42ghz chips.. Anyway's there is no guarantee, you're just as likely to have the part melt at 1.42ghz then work beautifully... Can also depend on your usage pattern low cpu usage in a cool environment will make things work much better then a 95 degree house with heavy usage...
-- Matthew Schiller
Electrical Engineer
Previous Apple Intern [Flat Panel iMac]
The mini really should be fast enough for most things. I have 1 ghz g4 tower. I do video editing/photoshop and dvd creation on it. The speed of that machine is good and the bus is about the same as the mini. I have 1.2 gigs of ram though.
DVD mastering and my degraining phtotoshop filter are the only things that make me wish a faster processor. I'm patient with the photoshop filter which can take 20 seconds or so, because my images are large (70 meg per file) (The DVD stuff which can take hours.)
Solder mask is basically a paint that isolates the various 'pads', or landing areas for component pins, physically in space, so that the solder has much less tendency to bridge gaps and cause shorts. Usually, it is green, but it can be made in any color. Myself, I've made boards with black, red or transparent solder mask. Green is the traditional color, and afaik, there is no performance difference electrically or physically between the colors.
Just for completeness' sake, the lettering you sometimes see on a PCB is called silkscreen, and is usually white, but again can come in a variety of colors like yellow or black. Again, tradition says it should be white.
PS: I'm not an electrical engineer, and I never will be.
Mostly random stuff.
Well usually a 0-ohm resistor is called a jumper in electronics-land.
Also, here's my guess on how he performed this hack. He looked up the datasheet either for the clock chip or for the processor and saw which jumper configurations set up the speed. Then he traced back the lines to those resistor pads, either by using sight or a multimeter.
Anyway, its a cool hack and pretty simple to do if you are comfortable handling 0402's.
As for warranty- mod it in a year when you want something to console you for owning a machine with close to the worst warranty in the business (1 year lots-of-questions-asked...and 90 days telephone support.)
For Dell's $499 home system:
90 Day Warranty3, 90 Day At-Home Service4, and 1Yr Technical Support, an extra $90 for two year service.
Gateway charges $60 to get the full year, their base warranty is buried in a PDF.
HPaq does provide a full year though.
The Cube was originally convection cooled (no fan). Most of the CPU and GPU upgrades add a fan, so it's not really the same thing.
So, unless you count TextEdit (yeah, I know some people do), there is no word processing included - and certainly no presentation programm.
Untrue.
The Mini comes with Appleworks 6, which has WP, Spreadsheet, Database and presentation (plus drawing and painting which I guess aren't too useful).
"I assumed that overclocking a slower chip to a faster speed would produce more heat than a chip designed to work at that speed."
It doesn't. Every batch of wafers is tested within certain tolerances.
* If they run fine all the time at 1.42 GHz, they're branded 1.42 and roll out the door.
* If they run unreliably at 1.42, but work fine at the lower speed, they get pushed out the door at that speed. "Unreliably" usually means "failed a test once out of several hundred runs".
* If a chip fails multiple times it's tossed.
All 3 chips are identical, it's just that the 1.42s are known to reliably run at that speed. If you're an overclocker, you take that 1 out of 500 runs error as a risk that's worth taking.
motorola makes the g4. ibm makes the g5
Motorola makes nothing. Freescale makes the G4 ;)
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Check out this hilarious Mac mini "review". It's tongue and cheek, written from the prospective of an MCSE. I couldn't stop laughing.
The video card in the mac mini is vastly inferior to the x-box card, since the x-box card is derived from a full power geforce 3.
The mini-card is a ATI Radeon 9200, which isn't better than a geforce 3.
You really have no clue, do you?
The X-Box is a 733 MHz Pentium system with 64 MB of system RAM, and the video "card" which you say is "derived from a full power geforce 3" is a 300 MHz GPU designed specifically for the X-Box by Microsoft and nVidia. It's an integrated chip which shares the system bus. It supports a maximum resolution of 1920x1080. Plenty good enough for hooking up to TV sets, even some HDTV sets, but pathetic by computer card standards.
I'll take the Radeon 9200 with it's own DDR video memory, thanks.
P.S. I've got both an X-Box and a mini, and have witnessed both of them perform. There's no question that the X-Box fails to even come close to the video performance of the mini. Sorry. It just isn't as good, no matter how much you might want it to be.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
FSB and memory-bus are two different things. 2.5Ghz G5 has a 1.25Ghz FSB, but it's memory-bus is 128bits wide and runs at 400Mhz (or rather, the RAM runs at 400Mhz).
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Current G4 was also meant for "embedded applications". It just happens to be a great CPU as well.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
As an MCSE (I know I know...) and an Apple Certified Technical Coordinator, it's my job to know how to answer this.
:D
Quite frankly, it's never been easier. When you want to connect to a windows server, in the URI field just type in smb:///
Your Mac will also have Samba running after checking one box in the system preferences. At that point, your windows boxes can either connect to home folder public / private folders, or with the admin password you'll get the whole hard disk.
Also, Mac OS X 10.3 will authenticate against Active Directory, and enable Single Sign-On through the use of AD's Kerberos keys. Setting that up is easy.
Setting up networked home folders using the AD auth is *not* easy, especially when moving from a NetInfo environment that has been operational for the last three years. That, however, is my issue to solve, and not yours.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
" The jumpers are not soldered, just normal (tiny) jumpers. "
They are most definetly soldered.
There are in fact, as the article states, "zero ohm resistors". To be fully accurate, you would call them "surface mount zero Ohm resistors". The page author goes on to say that you do not need to put them back to set your desired clock speed because you can just use a "blob of solder".
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
what's the difference between the 1.25 and the 1.42? Just those jumpers. That's it. It's the SAME CHIP.
Guess again.
The difference is, the ones that come set up to run at 1.42 gigaherz passed the factory testing to qualify for that clock rating.
Chips that come off the same manufacturing line vary. Not all of them will work reliably at the higher speeds, so they're all tested and graded. Some make the grade and are sold as 1.42 Ghz parts. Others make a lower grade and are sold as slower parts. Still others end up in the trash.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Try the Apple support forums for the Mini -- the users who post there tend to be pretty helpful. On top of that you may also find some answers at Mac OS X Hints -- even if they can't help with this particular issue, you're bound to find some good info on other things there.
The [Mac mini] DVI out plugs right into most modern HD televisons and projectors without the need for an adapter.
In my experience, this is often not the case. Even though high end telivisions have DVI jacks on them, they are using the YUV colourspace and not the RGB used for computer displays. I was annoyed to find this out, to say the least. Jacks are the same, but no-go. So the best video output you can do with the Mac mini is using the S-video dongle, which is not bad.
Another thing worth mentioning is that OS X does not need any extra software for this video display, and includes native controls for antialiasing levels and overscan on the fly. Makes a big difference for text on a television screen.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.