[joshdowney]

Hi,

I've bought my first ever Mac off eBay for a great price, only thing is it's an old Mac Mini and it probably is going to need upgrading. Although i've never had a Mac i've been upgrading PCs for years so i'm not necessarily new to getting my hands dirty. I've sourced a new hard drive for it as it only had 80gb and i've looked over many tutorials and videos on how to replace it and i'm feeling pretty confident on replacing it. Thing is though, I thought whilst i'm already opening the case to upgrade the hard drive should i upgrade the 1.66 ghz intel core duo CPU to an intel core 2 duo? I've look on eBay and saw quite a few, would this one fit?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Core...#ht_844wt_1265

If not, what about this one?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...#ht_500wt_1156

Or even this one?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...#ht_535wt_1031

What's the difference between them?

Don't really want to spend too much, but if I have to i'll wait a bit and save up some money. Do you think this is worth it? As the CPUs on eBay with the M socket are only £10-20 so I thought for that price it must be? Can you offer any other advice or tips?

This is my first post here and I am hoping you can help,

Thanks in advance,

Josh

[Waragainstsleep]

Hi Josh, welcome.

according to this page:

Mac Mini Core 2 Duo CPU Swaps (2006-2008 minis)

You should be fine with the T7200.

[l008com]

If you really want to make that a fast mini, replace the optical drive with a hard drive carrier, and stick a scorpio black 7200 RPM hard drive in there. Then replace the 80 GB drive with a small fast SSD drive. Of course Max out the RAM (which I believe is only 2 GB unfortunately). The RAM limit will be painful but going with an SSD boot/apps drive will make that thing feel real fast for day to day activities.

[Camali]

I just upgraded an 2006/07 Mac mini to give to my niece. Here's what I upgraded 1.83 Core Duo to 2.33 Core 2 Duo (T7600), 2gb to 4gb, Airport card to N spec and the 120gb to 64gb SSD (for a total of $250!) The only problem is the machine only sees 2gb RAM (Slot 0 is empty regardless of which SODIMM is in it, so modules seem fine) and I'm unable to install Lion (unless I do what is suggested online, but 10.7.2) breaks the installation.

This is a Mac mini1,1 and I've read you can upgrade the EFI firmware to get around the 2gb limit. Anyone try this? Until 10.7.3 shows up will I install Lion on it.

SL boots up in seconds, so it makes the Mac mini feel way faster than it was before.

Also, if you're thinking of upgrading the processor, plan ahead and buy some nylon screws just in case the clips break off when putting the heatsink back on!

[eddieitman]

Not strictly true that the Mini 1.1 can only use 2gb it can run 4gb in 2x2gb by hacking the bios and the advantage to it is that the mac aluminium keyboard will boot to cd once done.
See my post on here with instructions
Log in

[eddieitman]

Well i tried it and it works a treat my Old Mac Mini has a whole new lease of life
My original mini was a 1.5ghz i upgraded it to a Core 2 Duo Cpu a few years back but with only 2gb (the max) of Memory it was showing its age with aperture, not an issue as i use the macbook, but i thought if only i could have 4gb it would still fly so i found this on a french site and decided to try it
1st download the files
Archive.zip
copy the extracted files to
/ System / Library / CoreServices / Firmware Updates
Then in terminal
type
sudo bless -mount / -firmware /System/Library/CoreServices/Firmware\ Updates/EFIUpdaterApp.efi -payload /System/Library/CoreServices/Firmware\ Updates/LOCKED_MM11_0055_08B.fd -options "-x efi-apple-payload0-data" --verbose

once that finishes reach round the pack and press the power button off hold it in until the lights flash keep it pressed in till its all off
power back on and you should hear a bing and see a progress bar that flashes once that completed the mac will reboot you will see that the screen seems to have screen corruption dont worry about that power of and perform a pram reset

hold alt+cmd+p+r inmediatly after powering on and hold in untill it reboots.
then upgrade the memory to 2x 2gb and perform the pram again


See original post here
10.7 Lion sur un MacMini1,1 Core2Duo - Forums MacBidouille

and as a bonus it fixes the issue with teh aluminium keyboard and old mac minis

Have been using thsi for about 5 months in my mini with no issues and upgraded to a T7200

[johnno29]

Hi, thanks for the post, however I'm getting the folling error when I run the terminal command...Any Ideas?

Thanks!


EFI found at IODeviceTree:/efi
GPT detected
No auxiliary booter partition required
System partition found
Returning booter information dictionary:
<CFBasicHash 0x7ff6a0502680 [0x7fff7f077fa0]>{type = mutable dict, count = 3,
entries =>
0 : <CFString 0x105dc5fb0 [0x7fff7f077fa0]>{contents = "System Partitions"} = (
disk0s1
)
1 : <CFString 0x105dc5f70 [0x7fff7f077fa0]>{contents = "Data Partitions"} = (
disk0s2
)
2 : <CFString 0x105dc5f50 [0x7fff7f077fa0]>{contents = "Auxiliary Partitions"} = (
)
}

Substituting ESP disk0s1
Mounting at /Volumes/bless.tcHF
Executing "/sbin/mount"
Returned 0
Creating /Volumes/bless.tcHF//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE if needed
Deleting previous contents of /Volumes/bless.tcHF//EFI/APPLE/FIRMWARE
Can't load /System/Library/CoreServices/Firmware\
Could not load data from /System/Library/CoreServices/Firmware\
Executing "/sbin/umount"
Returned 0
Error while writing firmware updater for EFI

[Waragainstsleep]

Can the 2007 Mini be flashed to read 4GB of RAM?

[thecutler]

Yes the Mac mini 1.1 can have a maximum spec of 2.33 core 2 duo, SSD what ever size you choose and you can flash the bios to accept 4GB of ram and that's it which will take the geekbenched score from around 900 to 3170. One advantage of flashing the bios is that the machine code changes its I'd from 1.1 to 2.1 which gets around the install issues with 1.1 machines not been able to install lion without removing the playlist.

Thanks must go to eddieitman for his excellent guide above I found changing the firmware very easy thanks to his guide.

Mac Mini 1.1 flashed to 2.1
2.33GHz core 2 Duo
Running Lion
256 Crucial M4 SSD
4GB Ram
;-)

[Waragainstsleep]

My 2007 Mini is a Mac Mini 2,1 but only takes 3GB RAM.

[thecutler]

Yes that's a good point the chipset of the 1.1 and 2.1 preceded 64 bit processors, therefore even though its possible for the machine to recognise it has 4GB of ram installed the chipset will reduce its availability to 3.333r on reflection increasing the ram from 2 to 4 on this model gives marginal improvement the biggest gain is seen if you change the hard drive for a SSD take into consideration the HD bus it limited to SATA 1.5 which is slow compared to SATA 3 but will give you three times the speed of an average normal drive, for example from dead to login is about 19 seconds.

[P]

Originally Posted by thecutler 

Yes that's a good point the chipset of the 1.1 and 2.1 preceded 64 bit processors, therefore even though its possible for the machine to recognise it has 4GB of ram installed the chipset will reduce its availability to 3.333r

Something like that. The issue is not specifically the CPU but the chipset. Said chipset only supported 4 GB addressing space, and that addressing space was split between RAM and other hardware. For the first (Core Duo) mini, the split (as set in firmware) was 2GB for RAM and 2GB for other hardware. For the second (Core 2 Duo), the split was 3 GB for RAM and 1 GB for other hardware.

Originally Posted by thecutler 

on reflection increasing the ram from 2 to 4 on this model gives marginal improvement the biggest gain is seen if you change the hard drive for a SSD take into consideration the HD bus it limited to SATA 1.5 which is slow compared to SATA 3 but will give you three times the speed of an average normal drive, for example from dead to login is about 19 seconds.

I disagree. Update the RAM first - it is cheaper, easier and gives a nice boost. The advantage with SSDs is not the maximum transfer rate so much as the random read/write performance.

[thecutler]

Yes upgrading the machine from 512 to 2GB of ram is inexpensive and I agree is a good 1st step forward for the machine, my point was increasing from 2 to 4 doesn't give as much of an improvement as 512 to 2GB. It you have upped the machine memory changing the processor or hard drive gives a better performance return.