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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."
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.
Did you check the jumpers? Good luck while playing with them.
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.
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
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.