Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSKK7ZjhkC4
Maxxing Out My Old 2006 Intel Mac Mini - CPU, RAM, SSD… eGPU!?
Introduction
In 2006 Apple released their first generation of Intel machines. This range included the MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini - and I bought one, brand new! Surprisingly for Apple machines, they were quite upgradeable, and so 18 years later and armed with eBay and money to burn, I decided to bring my trusty old Mac Mini out of retirement and finally let it live up to its full potential.
Script
This is my Mac Mini, and I’ve owned this from new since I bought it in 2006 - and it was one of the very first generation of Intel CPU Macs. So it has a 32 bit Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz CPU in it, and when I bought it, it had 512MB of RAM - although I did upgrade that pretty swiftly to 2GB, because some of my very earliest video editing attempts were on this machine, in conjunction with a Firewire camcorder, believe it or not - and you never know, I might unearth those and show them off on the channel at some point in the future. But, as you can see, this thing has been through the wars - it’s in an absolute state, and there’s a very good reason for that, because once I stopped using this as my main computer at home, it got moved into my arcade machine, the VideoStar Mark II.
And these strange wires that you see sticking out of the back were wired directly into the power switch on the motherboard, and they went to an external power button on the actual arcade cab itself, and of course the Velcro was to kind of hold it all together and also hold it inside the cab - and to top it all off, a bit of cable management as well with these clips, which of course I’m going to cut off because they are now surplus to requirements.
And after that, it went into storage for quite a few years, which explains why it’s quite so disgusting and filthy. So I thought it was about time that I’d finally bring this thing back out of retirement, completely max it out and let it live to its full potential - but first, we need to check whether it still works, and also have a little look at how the software was set up on this.
So this thing hasn’t been used in how many years? I have absolutely no idea but let’s see if it does something. It’s just sat on this white boot screen at the moment.
Okay, something, something’s happening, I can’t quite remember, I think, was it Windows XP?
Yeah! Windows XP that I was running on here, wow, that’s perfect timing.
Yeah, okay, so it seems like the Mac Mini’s still working, the hard drive’s still good to some extent, we’re just booting up - I can’t quite remember just how long it took this thing to boot up back in the day. It has a 750GB Seagate hybrid hard drive in it which is SSD paired with a an old fashioned mechanical hard drive - I think it’s from the very early days of SSDs when they were ridiculously expensive and it was kind of the best compromise I could afford at the time.
But yeah, look, we’re booting into XP. So, I seem to remember that I had this set up so it would go straight into an arcade frontend…. There we go. Wow, okay!
Giant mouse pointer, I guess it’s running in a lower resolution.
Let’s see what we have here…
My goodness, wow. Yes, I remember this, God. This came with-
I think I bought some X-Arcade arcade sticks and they came with a license for this frontend, which I think is called Maximus Arcade or something like that? I think I vaguely remember getting all of this set up with all of these different emulators and things, but I haven’t seen this in years.
Oh wow! So okay, it responds to the keyboard input. Of course, when I used this with my arcade machine, I had it set up with something called a MiniPAC, which was like an arcade control to USB interface so all of the mappings map to that, but of course it just emulates a keyboard. So I’ve got MAME on here, we’ve got the NES, the SNES - apologies American viewers - we’ve got the Mega Drive or the Genesis, we’ve got the Master System, the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance - and yeah, back round to MAME again.
So, how cool is that? That is quite amazing. So I guess for old times sake-
Is that just first on the list? Oh yeah, maybe that’s just first on the list.
But I guess for old times sake we could probably fire up MAME one last time just before we wipe this thing and do something a bit more useful with it.
So yeah, let’s go for one of my favourite games of all time, the arcade version of Bubble Bobble - I’ll fire that up in MAME. I don’t even know if this is going to work still.
“There are problems with this machine. Type OK, I’ll move the joystick left then right.”
OK
Bubble Bobble! OK, there we are. So that’s the attract loop. The sound’s working. It’s quite quiet, but we’ll insert a coin, and I think it’s-
Wow, now the amount of play that this must have had over the years on that arcade cabinet - so I think it’s only right to play it one last time just before we check out the rest of this PC.
Anyway, that’s enough fun and games for one day, and I just quit back to the Windows desktop, and I had something pop up saying that Windows had detected some wireless networks, and that reminded me of the hardware situation and the driver situation with this specific Mac Mini in Windows.
Of course, this is all supported by Boot Camp, and indeed, I have an ancient version of Boot Camp on here - this is version 1.4 Beta, apparently - and there is a bit of a control panel associated with this, I seem to remember. So, we can choose whether we want to boot into Windows or MacOS. I actually nuked the MacOS partition on this, in fact I don’t think I even installed MacOS in the first place, I think I just went for just Windows on its own. But you’ve got a few options in here, so you can restart it, you can disable the infrared receiver, and of course, restart automatically after a power failure, which I remember specifically setting, of course, because I had this in the arcade cabinet and wanted it to power up automatically.
And yeah, Boot Camp also comes with a full set of drivers for all of the hardware that’s in this machine - and I think, I mean, I think this is an older version, but of course it supports the network adapters, wireless and wired - it’s got gigabit networking built in. It supports all of the USB stuff, all of the… That’s the one I was just looking for - the sound hardware, of course, we’ve just heard that working. The graphics drivers, we’ve got a full selection of resolutions available on here - and as you can probably see, the performance of this is actually really nice.
I have Emulation Station set up on here - I don’t really remember ever running this. In fact, it’s complaining that it’s not detected any gamepads or anything I think I installed this as a potential replacement for… for Maximus… Optimus… whatever it was called, Maximus Arcade and I just never got around to finishing setting it up I guess because I was happy with Maximus and just wanted to get on with playing some games and stuff but there’s an ancient version of Firefox on here…
So yeah, this is version 39.0.3, which would have been the latest version, I guess, when I set all of this up so that probably dates this - I’ll have to go and have a look and see when that was released - and we’ve got BitTorrent, QBitTorrent, because when I downloaded the ROM sets for MAME on here, I think I used this to download those.
Or was it just used to- it’s not the default application. No, I think I moved on to Transmission a little bit later on. So that’s Transmission, that’s another torrent client.
Of course downloaded those totally legitimately like we all do. We’ve got WinIPAC, that’s the configuration software for my arcade interface, that USB arcade interface that I mentioned earlier.
Just your usual tools, WinDirStat, we’ve got Notepad++ looks like that’s got- that’s all of the configuration files for the various emulators that I’ve got on here so I was obviously fiddling with those - and yeah, other than that, I think it’s just a fairly bog standard Windows XP installation. The account is called “VideoStarMkII”, the name of the machine is “VideoStar”, of course that’s what it says on the marquee on my arcade machine, so all tied in with the branding on that.
And I’ll just check out the My Documents and the Downloads folder, so we’ve got various tools and things on here, we’ve got Ninite and that’s 7-Zip installer, CPU-Z and all of that stuff.
So, yeah, a real time capsule, this machine, but of course it’s served that very noble purpose of running my arcade cab for all those years. It’s been in retirement, it’s been in storage for how long? Just tucked away in a box in the garage - and I think it’s finally time to bring it back out, kicking and screaming from that retirement, revive it, fully max it out, and finally let this machine live up to its full potential.
So what exactly is the plan, I hear you ask? And I’m very glad that you did ask, because I have quite a few ideas in mind for this tiny little machine - and I’m going to start with the CPU. There were two different CPU options when this was brand new - there was the Core Duo 1.66GHz, and I actually went for the slightly faster option at the time, which was the 1.83GHz, but this can be upgraded even further. Now, this wasn’t officially offered or supported by Apple at the time, of course, but it has since been discovered that the CPU is socketed and can be replaced with one of these - now this is a Core 2 Duo T7600, and that has a clock speed of 2.33GHz, so that’s quite a big boost on the stock CPU - and not only that, it’s also 64 bit, which we’ll get into in a bit, if you pardon the pun - and of course, if we’re going to be upgrading the CPU, then it also makes sense to upgrade the RAM, and this machine indeed takes SODIMMs, they’re DDR2 PC2-5300 clocked at 667MHz, and it is upgradable but the trouble is, back in the day, I already maxed this thing out with Apple’s maximum supported configuration of 2GB - so where does that leave us?
Well, it turns out a few years after this machine’s peak, back in 2007, some very clever person managed to hack the firmware and actually increase the maximum RAM support to 4GB - and they did that by using basically a firmware from a later model that had been shoehorned into this one. So I’ve now picked up 4GB worth of SODIMMs to slot into this thing, and I think it only makes sense to upgrade that as well.
So with the CPU and RAM situation sorted, we turn our attention to storage.
Now, as mentioned, this actually has a pretty decent hard drive in it already - it’s got that 750GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive in there but of course there have been many generations of SSDs since then, and someone has very, very kindly donated a Samsung 960 1TB SSD to me - so thank you ever so much for that, you know who you are, and I know you don’t want your name mentioning on the channel, but this is going to be the next upgrade because I have it, and it should help to increase the performance. So yeah, let’s slap a Samsung SSD in there as well.
…and finally, and this is either the most ambitious or the most foolish of the upgrades that I’m going to be attempting today - I’ll leave that up to you to decide - but that’s a desktop GPU, it’s an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750Ti and of course, it’s not going to fit inside the Mac Mini, but there is precedent for this - there were people setting up eGPU setups back in the day, and I actually had something very similar on a Core 2 Duo laptop, which is the machine that replaced this. I haven’t found any evidence of anyone ever getting this to work on an Intel Mac Mini, but you know what? I want to give it a try. The integrated Intel GMA950 graphics are absolutely abysmal, so it’s got to be worth a try. But first, to be able to max out the RAM, as I mentioned, we’re going to have to upgrade the firmware, so let’s do that.
And as far as I know, there isn’t actually a way to do this firmware update from within Windows, so I’ve reinstalled MacOS - this is the last officially supported version on this hardware, which is version 10.6 Snow Leopard, and it will be perfectly fine for our purposes - and of course, I will link to the files and the instructions that I used down in the description, just in case you’re looking to do this to your own Mac Mini, but yeah, a very brief summary of the process: basically, just copy some files across using a USB stick and drop those into the correct place, and then run a command which will “blesses” those files as far as the Mac hardware is concerned - so it makes them bootable and makes them look like a legitimate firmware update - and then we just need to reboot the Mac Mini and clear the NVRAM which is covered in the instructions, and after a reboot we can see that the version number of the Mac Mini has changed from 1,1 to 2,1, so this thinks it’s actually a second generation Intel Mac Mini and allows us to install the additional RAM.
And so that means it’s finally time to crack this thing open so we can stick those new RAM sticks in there - and to do that I’m going to be using an official Apple authorized tool from back in-
No I’m not actually, I’m going to be using this wallpaper scraper - other methods are available - you can use plastic credit cards, you can use proper spudgers, but this has always worked for me - and I remember doing this on some friends’ Mac minis as well to upgrade their RAM as well all those years ago. But the way that this thing fits together is that basically there are some plastic clips around the outside and we need to separate those from the metal outer case and the way that we do that is by shoving our flat implement betwixt the two…
Okay I’m a little bit out of practice but we got there in the end and what we can see here is the DVD drive, we’ve got the wi-fi antenna which we’re going to have to take out to get some other bits out of the way - and there’s a little spring here so don’t lose that. This is the Bluetooth antenna, that can stay in place and there is a tiny little cable just here which is for the fan speed control and that needs to be unplugged so we don’t damage that, and then just a couple of screws to take out.
And it turns out it is literally just a couple of screws, because there’s supposed to be four, but evidently I only put two back in the last time I was in here all those years ago. But there we go. Now this top part should hinge backwards - you can also unplug this ribbon cable at the back but you don’t really need to do it just to upgrade the RAM.
And now we can see our innards. So we’ve got the Mini PCIe slot there which has our wi-fi card in - or “AirPort” card as Apple called it - we have our CPU just here which is under this heatsink, and of course we’re going to be removing that to upgrade the CPU. But this is the bit that we’re interested in for the moment, and this of course is the RAM - and if you’ve ever upgraded RAM before, then this should be a pretty straightforward process.
And that’s it! And after roughly reassembling things, the Mac does indeed successfully boot up and we can go into “About This Mac” and see the full 4GB being recognised and indeed click through to the system profiler and double check it in there as well - so now let’s turn our attention to that CPU.
And perhaps surprisingly for an Apple product, this actually isn’t all that complicated either - although there are a few extra things that we’ll need to unplug so I’ve removed that top part by just unplugging that ribbon cable, there’s this wi-fi antenna here - you don’t really need to take that off but I just want to get it out of the way anyway - and then there are two other bits. So there’s this thing here, I haven’t actually quite worked out what this does, but it has the power LED on it at least, and there’s also where the power button plugs into the motherboard - and yeah, I guess I’ll deal with this at some point before I finally put it all back together.
And perhaps most importantly, there is this little screw in the corner just here which is just a hex bit, and that just unscrews, and then the motherboard should just come straight out like so - and you may have noticed these nylon screws holding the CPU heatsink on, which of course aren’t original. It would have originally had little plastic spring clips like these, and the reason for those is because when I did my arcade machine build I actually managed to break the spring clips on the CPU heatsink, or at least a couple of them, and I had a look on some Mac forums and people were recommending replacing them with M3 nylon screws, and yeah, they seem to have done the job but I need to remove those of course, and get this heatsink off.
And of course, nestled underneath is that weedy little Core Duo T2400. We can see the specs on here: 1.83GHz, 2MB of cache, and that’s at 667MHz bus speed. So we just turn this screw, which unlocks the socket, and that just pops out - and then the new CPU pops straight in - and we can see the specs on this one, so it’s a T7600 and it’s 2.33GHz, 4MB of cache, and indeed that 667MHz bus speed so that should work no problems at all.
…and so, sadly, that means that our all too brief nostalgia trip down Snow Leopard Lane must soon come to an end, but not before booting into the OS for the third and final time just to check out a few things - of course, we can go into “About This Mac” and see that the new CPU is recognised, and click through to the System Profiler and you can see all of the specs there - Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.33GHz, that 4MB of level 2 cache, and indeed, the 4GB of RAM - and of course I ran the Geekbench benchmarking tool before and after the CPU upgrade - that’s version 2, which is the latest version that will run on Snow Leopard - with the Core Duo we have a score of 2430 and the Core 2 Duo we’ve got a score of 3164, which is a big improvement across the board. So very, very worthwhile upgrade. So the very last thing to do is just to put that SSD in there And we can install a modern operating system.
The hard drive and the optical drive live in this top part of the case that we set aside earlier, and the drive is just held in with four of these big chunky phillips screws, so I just need to remove those, and then it should slot out and the new drive slots straight in in its place.
So, as you can see, I’ve been on eBay again - but it only seemed right that the Ultimate Mac Mini would also have the ultimate set of matching accessories - and I just couldn’t afford this stuff back in 2006 when this was new, but now you can actually pick it up relatively inexpensively if you shop around. So we’ve got the 23” Apple Cinema HD display, we’ve got the matching aluminium keyboard, and we’ve got the Mighty Mouse, which I’m sure any Apple user will tell you was the last decent mouse that Apple ever made, but now our thoughts turn towards the operating system side of things - and the problem with that is that there just isn’t a modern version of MacOS that will run on this era of Mac Mini - I mean, as mentioned earlier the last officially supported version was Snow Leopard - 10.6 - which we saw running earlier on in the video. That was released in 2009 and stopped receiving updates in 2014, which was 10 years ago, so that’s not really a viable option.
After the Core 2 Duo upgrade we can actually install Lion on this, which is 10.7, but again, support for that finished in 2014 so not the kind of OS that you’d want to be running in 2024.
Unofficially, there are ways to get El Capitan installed on this - which is Mac OS 10.11 - and that was released in 2015 so it’s a much more modern OS, but unfortunately, again, no more security updates for it - those finished in 2018. So we’re going to have to go with something a bit more modern.
Now, if you’re a regular here, you’ll no doubt be thinking, “but Rees, aren’t you the guy who recently installed Windows 11 on a 20 year old Pentium 4 in a recent video?” and indeed I am, and of course that system was 2 years older than this, and had half the RAM of this, so surely Windows 11 would be a viable option for this Intel Mac Mini?
Well, I have tried it - through a lot of trial and error, I did eventually manage to get it to install and get it to boot - and unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to be a goer, there’s some serious issues with drivers - of course, being an Apple machine, you are quite reliant on Apple’s bootcamp drivers to get stuff up and running - and the last version of Windows that they officially supported on this machine, I think, was 7. I think 8’s okay at a push, and 10 might work - and I might check that out in a future video - but unfortunately there was just too much stuff that was broken under Windows 11. Particularly some weird graphics corruption like the top half of the File Explorer window just being completely missing, and right click context menus not coming up, oddly enough, and just some general stability issues and stuff like that.
So I do have something that I think will work, and that is Debian.
Yep, Debian, oddly enough, one of the world’s oldest Linux distros - it’s been around since 1993 - and of course it’s known for its excellent hardware compatibility, which is why it seems like the obvious choice for this particular installation. Now, I have tried so many different OSs over the past couple of weeks of experimenting, all sorts of modified disk images and things like that, because the trouble with this particular machine is that even though it now has a 64 bit CPU, it has a 32 bit UEFI, which of course is what handles all of the boot code and stuff - I’m not going to go into detail about EFI and how that works in this video - but this was actually an issue back in the day as well with this particular generation of Macs and the Core 2 Duos that came after it, which is basically what this is now.
Of course, you were running 64 bit operating systems, but the actual bootloader had to be 32 bit. Now, that’s not really a problem - it’s, you know, they don’t necessarily have to be the same. But the trouble with that is that the assumption is, with most operating systems, that if you’re running a 64 bit architecture and a 64 bit operating system, then surely it makes sense that you would also be running a 64 bit UEFI on that as well, and has been the bane of these Macs’ existence ever since they were new.
So yeah, that’s that. But it turns out that the Debian net installer actually includes a 32 bit UEFI bootloader and will actually boot quite happily from USB on the Intel Mac Minis, and go on to install a full blown 64 bit operating system which all works perfectly fine - and it’s the only Linux distro I’ve found so far that actually does that-
Just bear with me a second and I’ll fill these passwords in…
…so that is that, and that’s quite interesting - and I spoke earlier a little bit about getting Windows 11 up and running on this machine - and what I actually had to do was install it in Legacy BIOS Mode - and, I had to take the hard drive out of this and put it in another machine that I have here at the studio and start the installation off on that and then remove the hard drive and put it in the Mac Mini and that was the only way that I could actually get it to boot but of course that’s legacy BIOS mode - you don’t have the advantages of EFI, stuff like secure boot and that much faster boot and stuff like that. So ideally you want this kind of setup and good old Debian has come through with the goods once more!
Sorry, this mouse is a bit confusing.
“Write changes to disk” - Yes.
It’s just warning me that it’s going to wipe the hard disk.
The only thing I will say about this mighty mouse is that sometimes you think you’re clicking, but you’re actually right clicking, and the installer doesn’t seem to like that but anyway, there we go, that’s Debian, and that’s why it works on this machine, and of course, once I get that GPU in there, which I haven’t forgotten about in that eGPU setup using an adapter in the Mini PCIe slot, which I will show you very shortly, Linux is much more forgiving of that kind of thing whereas Windows is a bit rigid and a bit set in its ways - and in my experiments I just couldn’t get it to do anything at all under Windows, whereas Linux was a little bit more interesting. So there we go, I’m going to finish this Debian installation and hopefully the next time you see me we’ll be on the Debian desktop and ready to go - and the desktop that I decided to go with was XFCE, which I think is always an excellent choice for these older systems - and everything’s installed fine, all the hardware generally seems to have been recognized okay, and it’s running quite nicely but I did notice that graphically things were perhaps a little bit laggier than they could be, I appreciate the graphics chipset - the GMA950 - in the Mac Mini isn’t all that great. But yeah, what we really want to do is to get the most out of it - and I had a look in inxi, which is a profiler that lists hardware information and stuff, and spotted that we’re using the llvmpipe renderer, which is like a software fallback thing for graphics, which is not ideal.
If you’re having issues with rendering speed and redraw speed and stuff like that in Linux it’s always the first thing to check, so what we need to do is we need to go into our grub config and we need to add the actual correct kernel parameter for this driver, which is “i915.modeset.=1” - and then we just update our grub config and reboot the system - and that’s that issue fixed - and as you can see, I ran the glxgears program just before and after the change, and it’s made quite a big difference to that rendering performance - of course, every little ounce of performance that we can squeeze out of this old system is a good thing.
And personally, I’m going to be using this system just for Linux stuff - I mean, if you have a Linux machine around that you use for Linux stuff, I’m sure you know what I mean by that - but yeah, I mean, you could use it for office-type things, it has LibreOffice and that runs really, really nicely - you’ve got the word processor and the spreadsheet and all the rest of it on there.
Web browsing is actually a really nice experience in Firefox, no issues there at all. YouTube is Just about watchable, really, unless you want to watch stuff full screen, but yeah, at a pinch that will do. But of course, earlier I mentioned that eGPU thing, I teased you with that, and I think it’s finally about time that we try to get that working, because that would be a massive improvement over the Intel integrated graphics.
And to try to achieve that, I’m going to be using this little setup here - so, as you can see, this is a full size PCI Express 16x slot. It has a USB port on the end, it has a 6 pin power connector, and then there’s a USB cable that goes to this, which is a Mini PCIe thing, which goes inside the Mac Mini. Now, ignore this missing tab here, I snapped that off because… I don’t know why I snapped that off, that was a bit silly - and then the whole thing can be powered by this, but I’m just going to be using a standard ATX power supply - and this cost me £8 on Amazon, believe it or not, and it’s actually dead simple to install.
So we have our Mac Mini here, of course, and this is the AirPort card, or the wireless network card - and that actually did work perfectly fine in Debian, I didn’t show that earlier in the video because it wasn’t very interesting, but yeah, I could connect to wireless networks, no problems at all, but I am actually using the wired connection here so I’m not really going to be missing out on anything by replacing that - and then this thing just slots in there, and then the screw goes into here - and we’ll find a way to route the cable out the back here so we can connect to this externally - and if it works, I guess I’ll have to be making a hole in the case somewhere so I can make this into a bit of a more permanent thing. But yeah, the reason this works is because the Mac Mini’s PCI Express slot is full blown PCIe. It’s only 1x, so the performance of the graphics card, if it does work, is going to be limited, but yeah, you know, it should, in theory, work.
Now some older laptops and things have these slots but they only support USB or they only support SATA so they’re not full blown PCI Express but as far as I know the one in the Intel Mac Mini is - so let’s put this all back together and see what we can see.
“Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!”, as someone once famously said. That’s right, here it is, all set up - we’ve got the Mini PCIe card inside the Mac Mini, and the cable coming out to the PCI Express X16 slot here, and we have our power supply powering the whole shebang - so let me just press the button on the Mac…
…music to my ears - and yeah, the Mac Mini does boot up quite happily with this setup. Now, you will no doubt have spotted that I don’t actually have the graphics card in there at the moment - and that is because the Mac doesn’t actually boot with that in the slot so we’ll have to see what we can do about that in a moment, but it is quite happy with this USB 3 card - and indeed, I’m going to demo it right now so we can show that this thing does actually work - and here we are successfully booted to the desktop. So just to show that this is all working as expected, I’ll go into “System” and just go to the “System Profiler and Benchmark” - I believe this is called hardinfo, something like that, I think I manually installed this, but anyway, it just gives you a good overview of all of the devices connected to the system in a nice visual way. So if you go to “PCI Devices here”, of course, we can see all of the USB ports that are provided as part of the Intel i945 Express chipset that comes built into the Mac Mini, of course, as expected - but further down here, look, what’s this!? This is a “VIA Technologies USB 3 controller” - XHCI - and of course, way back in 2006 when this machine was built, it didn’t have a USB 3 controller - that is this card, which is plugged in via this whole shebang into the Mini PCIe slot - so that is quite interesting!
If we go through to “USB Devices”, we can also see it listed in here - so we’ve got the Linux Foundation USB 3 driver running there, so no problems at all - and if we open up a file browser, just to show this hardware actually working, we can take a USB thumb stick, which I have prepared earlier, and very, very carefully plug this in - because of course this is all a bit precarious and a bit wobbly and a bit exposed - but if we plug that in, there we go, look, it pops up immediately, and we can open that, and we can browse to it, and it’ll take a moment for this to open because for some reason PNGs set to open in Firefox, but yeah, just a couple of screenshots and things that I’ve been taking and video captures that I’ve been doing over the course of making this video.
So a USB3 thumbstick actually works via this convoluted setup in the Intel Mac Mini, which I think is quite astounding - but as I mentioned before, there are some issues with the graphics card. Now, of course, the system won’t actually boot up with that connected - so, yeah, I think we’re going to have to come up with something a little bit more dangerous!
…and by dangerous, if you hadn’t guessed yet, what I’m actually talking about is hot swapping stuff - pulling stuff out and plugging stuff in while the system is actually powered on. Now, there is precedent for this in the form of ExpressCard, which of course is a hot pluggable, hot swappable version of PCI Express, and indeed, I did some research into this, and PCI Express hot plug is a thing - it’s not really a thing for graphics cards, but there are some, like server hardware and stuff like that that does support it so I thought it would be worth a try, but I do really want to make it 100% clear that this is not a good idea, okay? This is an old machine, this is an old graphics card, there’s a very real danger of damaging something here, so please do not try this - this is just in the name of science and in the name of experimenting, but it wouldn’t boot up with that card in, so I don’t really have much choice in the matter. So what I’m going to do, just to make things a little bit safer, is just turn this power supply off, and then we can very carefully remove our USB 3 card from the slot - and just pop it out the back out of the way - replace it with our GTX 750Ti - which, by the way, I chose this because it doesn’t require any kind of external power - and then just switch the power supply back on - and that spins up as expected.
So we’ve got the fan spinning, we’ve got the graphics card powered up, and as we can see in the system information here, we’re still showing the USB 3 controller, so what we have to do is just close this, and then if we go back into “System”, and then “System Profiler”, and open this up again and go into “PCI Devices” - there it is! “NVIDIA Corporation GM107” - that’s a GeForce GTX 750Ti - and as we can see, it’s running the “nouveau” driver, which, of course, is the open source NVIDIA driver for Linux, so it actually recognised the card and it has loaded the driver for it, which again, is pretty astounding, but that’s where we run into a problem - you see, as you can see, I have a second monitor set up here ready to go, and this has an HDMI output on it so again, being very, very careful because this is indeed all a bit precarious - and I managed not to fry it a moment ago, so it would be a shame to fry it now - and if I just…
…these Samsung monitors are a bit awkward, but if I just change this to The HDMI input…
The card’s not actually outputting anything, and this is as far as I got in my testing really, so if I just pop over to the other side - and if we go into “Display”, even though the driver is loaded, we’re still only showing the one display adapter in here, which is the Intel i915, which we were using before - the integrated graphics, of course - and if I just load up the “Display Settings” here, just under “Settings”…
…as we can see, we’re only showing the one display connected rather than the two that we would be expecting. So, yeah, unfortunately, a bit of an anticlimax!
And that, as they say, is that - or at least for now. I mean, I have got a really nice upgraded Mac Mini out of all this - it’s got that 4GB of RAM, it’s got that much faster CPU, it’s got the SSD in it, we have Debian up and running on there which is going to be really useful for all my Linuxy stuff here around the studio, so absolutely not completely in vain but I must admit - and I’m sure you’ll probably agree - the outcome of that eGPU experiment is just a little bit disappointing because it’s just, it seems so close to working, and I’ve tried so many things. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to put this out to you, my viewers, and if someone comes up with a suggestion that actually works, down in the comments - of course I’m going to try everything that people suggest - you’ll get full credit, and I’ll do a follow up video, and we’ll run some Steam games on this, and it will all be glorious!
I will list what I have tried so far: I did try a much, much older, much more basic graphics card in this, just in case it was like a power issue or something like that, and the outcome was exactly the same with that. Also, interestingly enough, the Mac Mini won’t boot with that card in the slot either.
I tried timing the actual powering and the inserting of the card - so turning the Mac on and then very quickly switching the graphics card on before any of the Linuxy stuff started to initialize or anything - and in that case, and indeed, if I boot it up with nothing in the slot at all it doesn’t work after boot - so I can put that USB 3 card in and it doesn’t actually recognise that, which is quite interesting, so it needs something in the slot to be able to initialise it, I think.
I tried restarting the X server - obviously swapping the card, restarting the X server to see if Linux would pick that up and it didn’t - of course, if it had, I would have shown that to you - and I also tried another similar device to that PCIe to Mini PCIe breakout cable called an “EXP GDC Beast”, which had some quite good reviews, and I found some good contemporary reports of people actually using it with MacBooks of a similar era to this Mac Mini and indeed the same Intel chipset as this Intel Mac Mini, so I thought that was going to work but actually that didn’t do anything at all - and if you’re wondering why the cable looks like it does, that’s because I tried to dismantle it and tried to rewire the cable because I thought maybe there was some kind of cable fault - so I have ordered some replacement cables from AliExpress and I will be trying that as well just in case it is some kind of compatibility issue with the actual adapter that I’m using. But yeah, that’s it for now, I’m completely out of ideas with this, so I will put it out to you - and like I say, the bounty is that you will get full credit in the follow up video if and when we can get this thing working. So thanks ever so much to PCBWay for sponsoring this video, thank you to my patrons, my channel supporters, and my Ko-Fi members for supporting everything that I do here on the channel - and most of all, thank you to you for watching, and I hope you enjoyed coming on this little journey with me.
Original Video Links
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Relevant Links:
Mac Mini 2,1 Firmware: https://gist.github.com/adur1990/adf36f947e6261e47ed7d0d36b62bdbe
PCIe Adapter: https://geni.us/hlmD
Debian Net Installer: https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst
If you’re interested in my experiments in installing various operating systems on this machine, as well as why I eventually settled on Debian Linux, there is much more information available here: /2024-08-13-operating-system-options-for-32-bit-efi-mac-macmini-11-21-macbook-imac-64-bit-usb-install.html
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