Slashdot Mirror
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."
I can't imagine that little box is all that great at cooling. I know the cube wasn't. :)
I wonder if there is going to be a surplus of dead mac minis hitting ebay soon.
Pretty Pictures!
...but then the warranty will be void, and any mistake will be fatal. Damn Apple.
Stewed apple.
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 ?
No, not really. 1.42 GHz isn't really so much faster than 1.25 to justify voiding the warranty.
The G4 is crippled by its 167 MHz FSB, so how about overclocking that for some real performance boosts?
Is the jump from 1,25GHz to 1,42GHz that great an improvement. Yes I know how many operations are done in every Megahertz but in my mind, the point of the mini was not speed but rather using less power for simple things. My e-mail, browser, Word, soltaire, etc is not going to open that much noticably faster with this bump.
I like more speed as much as the next guy but the next guy didn't buy the Mac Mini for speed.
-Teiresias
$300 bucks? let me guess you used a case you already had, a hard drive you already had.
The componets are similiar to new PC's.
Your case is about 12 times the size of the mini. Heck even mini-itx systems end up being nearly twice the size.
So you spent $300 for a motherboard and CPU, because you already had everything else, and you can 'build' a mini for cheaper?
Yep you are officially not the target audeince.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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
First of all, the mac mini is cooled passively... It is designed to dispate the heat of what stuff Apple put in there. I know the attitude might be to do it for the sake of doing it, but why ruin a perfectly good mac-mini through overheating with it, with a relatively small gain in performance. I hope people don't do this in the long run as a permanent solution.
Although the Mac mini is said to be extremely quiet, it does have a fan. considering that Apple does produce a 1.42 MHz model, speeding up the 1.25 is probably not going to produce more heat than the system can handle.
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.
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"?
Because Red mobos run the fastest, and Apple didn't want to make the Mac Mini too fast otherwise it would have killed G5 sales.
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.
So let me get this straight...
Frequency doesn't matter when comparing processor performance because PPC chips do more per cycle _but_ frequency is important when comparing FSB's because doing more per per cycle is some how irrelevant?!
I find it a bit scarry that you can change these things from within windows rather than the BIOS. This seems like its more likely that an average user would modify the values and cause problems. Nothing like low core voltage or high FSB to give a nice stable system! Computer too loud? I'll just turn off the fan - much better.
Why the hell not? Some engineers like to take a little pride in their work and make things look neat - have you never seen the inside of a PowerMac G5?
No wires.
Not one.
That was classic intercourse!
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.
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.
I don't get the complaints about the news/market share ratio. The most interesting stuff is not what everyone's doing, but rather what's happening on the fringes. I mean, if that's the news you're looking for, try here.
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.
"...when you consider how small of a share of the market they have."
Yeah, same with all these Linux and Firefox stories!
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
they will always lack this aspect of providing what the customers REALLY want or need
Yes, but most customers don't really NEED those features. Just geeks. And the geeks who want to play with their hardware that way know they won't get that from Apple.
Basically what I'm saying is that, while it's true Apple doesn't let you play with FSB, voltage, etc, people don't buy Apple hardware to do that. And would they if Apple provided a means to make your system unstable in that way? Probably not.
I mean, the company motto is "It Just Works."
Then your iMac Mini will be about as valuable as a melted iMac Mini! This will give a whole new meaning to the Rip, Mix, Burn media campaign.
If every single computer user was a geek then you'd have a valid point, but you fail to realize 0% of the worlds computing population care about that stuff.
Surely geeks must make up some non-zero percentage of the computing population.
Well, they're RELATIVELY slow. DV only needs to use FW in 100 mode anyway, and it only uses around a third of THAT bandwidth running along at 1X. Modern external desktop FW drives give you pretty much continuous full FW 400 bandwidth, way more than enough for iMovie style usage.
That was classic intercourse!
Ten dollars to the company that makes the first tie-dye motherboard!
Mac Mini does come with some pretty nice software out of the box. To me this makes up the difference between the price of a Mini and the price of a low end PC ($300 Celeron/Semperon + Radeon 9200)
Mac OS X (Windows XP OEM costs at least $50)
iMovie - editing software, better than Avid FreeDV or Microsoft Movie Maker 2.0
iDVD - DVD mastering software for making menus, etc, and burning to DVD
Garage Band - compose, edit, and mix music
Also included, but not too useful for schools:
iPhoto - sort, edit, and print digital photos
iTunes
Xcode - software development suite for C/C++/Java
Quicken 2005
Nanosaur 2
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.
I see a bunch of posts discussing the fact that the mini will have problems cooling the overclocked CPU.
/. can answer anyways.
Too lazy/busy to do some real research here, I know that someone here on
The same case is used for the faster processor. How different are the processors themselves? ie, The mini has already been designed to handle the heat output of the 1.45GHz, so how much more heat (if any) would an overclocked lesser cpu generate?
Is cooling the overclocked chip even a concern?
Why is the MoBo blue?
They come in all colors depending on the shop that makes them.
If you would like, you can call this Steve's "blue period."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
People complaining that the hack is really not worth voiding the warranty are missing the whole point. It is just the coolness factor out here. Somebody, somewhere figured out that by setting those specific tiny little jumpers (I still can't believe how tiny they are), the Mac Mini could be overclocked and shared this info with the whole wide world. Appreciate that and just think about what *you* have figured out lately. Losers.
Your right about avoiding this as a permanent solution. I applied this jumper trick to an older G3 model and over time even with additional cooling the performance tailed off until I was forced to switch back the the base settings.
6% increase in the CPU speed merits voiding the warranty? (and this *will* void the warranty - good luck trying to explain any heat damages when the apple S/N says what was purchased was a 1.25 GHz, but the machine profile says 1.42 GHz.)
Funnily enough, the BMW Mini One can be 'overclocked' too. Like the CPU in the two Mac Mini models, both the One and the Cooper have the same 1.6 litre engine, the only difference being the engine management software. Must be something in the name 'Mini'...
You must think in Russian.
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
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
I think this is a result of the open competition between manufacturers, and as longa s Mac's are the toy of a single company, they will always lack this aspect of providing what the customers REALLY want or need, but only what the company is willing to provide.
Actually, I think this is the result of Windows users who are emotionally insecure, and willing to clutch at any straws they can to reassure themselves their rig is "better" than a Mac.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
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."
Actually, this might be interesting to use for underclocking. Take your Mac Mini 1.42, underclock it a bit to 1.25, and it's even less likely that the included fan will turn on. Makes it all the more of a silent computing solution.
They do this type of thing all the time at silentpcreview, although they gain a bit more (by way of silence) because they can also adjust the CPU voltage down once the clockspeed is reduced. Just a thought. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
All this talk about saving money by overclocking it is goofy (not so goofy if you are just a nerd looking to play with it)
I find it interesting that all the comparisons I've read primarily compare the hardware of the mac mini to the hardware at a comparibly priced Pee Cee system.
The fact that one system runs OS X and the other runs Windoze always seems to be a secondary consideration when looking at the price tag and comparing it to a Dell/clone/ect...
The fact that you can buy an OS X system that "feels" just as fast or faster than a comparible Pee Cee system AND has all the advantages of OS X over Windoze (security, ease of use, ect..) is something you should factor in when evaluating the price. How much is it worth to you in $$$? Is saving $200 bucks on a Dell worth the heartache that living in the windoze world entails?
Does anyone know if you can overclock a PowerBook? I know that overclocking notebooks is generally considered a bad idea (heat dissipation), but if you can overclock a mini, why not? I've got a much used and abused 12" 867 AlBook that I would love to get up to 1 Ghz.
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.)
Let's see. Low end Dells and Mac Minis are both sold as high-performance computing devices, there is that. Also, ":)" at the end of the message means the author is flamin' serious. Nope! Still something missing! If your head just didn't hurt so much when you were trying to think...
To find out, get an $725 Dell, download a 2 hour movie from your digital camcoder, add some music, watermark captions and video transitions and burn it to DVD. Report your experience here.
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.
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.
Apples aren't the cheapest machines. You can always get a slighty higher spec machine for less $ in the PC realm.
But the 199$ pc you point to has some real difference to the mini. I think they have significant differences in there target markets.
The PC--
No Dvd player.
No CD burner.
only 128 megs of ram (what century is this?)
Linshpere which is fine, but if you wanted windows add $$ (I think about 200$ if bought retail).
With mac your also paying for the applications they through in and OS X os and support.
Sorry, but if someone is going to tell me how to open my brand new computer and mess around with its internal workings, I don't want to read things like this:
Here is the bottom of the board. Or whatever you call it.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
with everything you need
Assuming you can live with integrated video, no DVD, 128M RAM, Lindows OS, no FireWire, no DVI, no iLife, ugly box, etc.
Come on, you're not really suggesting that that computer would be a good purchase are you?
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.
Well first start with the CPU the G4 can crunch about 150% more than a x86 (it varies)
Price watch
tower 2 ghz on board network and video and windows $250
Video card (because a shared memory isn't equal to a nvidia$50
Upgrade the memory to 512mb ~$50(depends on type)
Total $350 Plus say an hour to assemble at $40/bucks an hour employee rate.
$390 and you have a comparable performace. Of course your still using a butt ugly case that is noisey, takes up 10 time the physical space.
Quality does matter, Apple isn't perfect, but I do prefer it over my dell everyday.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
So why oh why does apple sell a 500 dollars computer with 2 year old components.
To meet a price point, while retaining the build quality they want.
It has occurred to me that making it so tiny DOES make it desirable, but it must push the price up. Would I be as tempted by a $400 Mac which is slightly larger than the Mini, about as powerful, with a cheaper full-size HDD?
My head says yes: all I want is a cheap way to try out Mac OS (because although I don't expect to like it, I'd like to have an informed opinion).
My heart says no: it's appealing because it's so small.
Apple colours its boards based on their classification.
Red boards are pre-production and prototype boards, blue ones are "customer ready" boards that will be shipped as the final product.
I think they use orange as well - the logic board in my iBook was orange.
Um, yeah.
So, you are going to keep these around long enough without losing them so you can put them back? Good luck.
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
Not true. I have a 5 year old Toshiba PIII laptop with a fan in it. When it comes on, it comes on loud and fast. There is no slow and quiet spin up and as a result, it is very noticeable and annoying.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
While I have to use windows at work, since the original iMac came out I've used Macs at home exclusively. Now you notice, this was pre-OSX. Yes, MacOS 9x sucked, but I endured it out of principle (not that anyone does that for any modern x86 OS, right?). What I didn't do was complain that there were no Mac stories on slashdot. Why? Because the OS was deemed unfeasible for the sufficiently technically inclined (you, I'm guessing). Fast forward six years, and not only does Apple ship arguably the nicest 'nix out there, but they've also done some amazing things with their hardware from both an engineering and design standpoint. I'm sorry, but Apple is quite relevant to the
This assuming you are looking for an alternative to setting your prefs to block apple stories.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
I'd like to know how high you can clock one of the 1.4Ghz models, though I doubt I'd do it myself if I had a Mini; those jumpers are tiny, and it's not like you can put a big ol' HSF on the CPU to compensate for the heat, at least not without ruining the Mini's appeal.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Check out this hilarious Mac mini "review". It's tongue and cheek, written from the prospective of an MCSE. I couldn't stop laughing.
I'm a hardcore computer nerd, but this Apple news isn't the slightest bit interesting to me.
Let's see: the resurrection of NeXTSTEP, the blissful marriage of open source with corporate proprietary technology, a rallying point against the Microsoft hedgonomy, a desktop UNIX that your grandmother can use, a box with a groundbreaking price-point and footprint, and definite proof that geeks can have style, and you have zero interest whatsoever?
The definition of "hardcore computer nerd" must be very lax in your neck of the woods.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Someone should tell intel that 133*4=532. Looks like they still haven't fixed that multiplication bug from the original pentium...
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
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.
As others have pointed out, basically it's no problem. A few weeks ago a PC laptop using friend visited and we needed to swap some files to my iBook. We both had wireless cards, but his was "broken", and hadn't worked for some time according to him. Luckily my wife knows Windows (I don't) and had it fixed in short order. Getting an ad-hoc wireless connection between the machines was then the work of about 2 minutes, mainly spent grappling with the arcane network settings on the XP machine, which turned out to be configured oddly - In the end it was much easier to simply change the Mac's settings to go with the PC's existing setup. From then on it was child's play to drag and drop files between the machines. My friend was impressed that it seemed so easy as he normally struggles with connecting his laptop anywhere (given its settings, probably no surprise), though to be fair he was an ex-Mac user forced to switch to a PC by his employer.
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.