Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjX6SyvMuuU
Adding An eGPU To The 1st Gen Intel Mac Mini
Introduction
In a previous video I upgraded my original 2007 “polycarbonate” Intel Mac Mini’s CPU, RAM and storage. I also tried to get an external GPU working to replace the frankly awful onboard GMA 950 graphics, but I couldn’t get it to work. Well, I’m back - and with some good news…
Script
This is my original 2007 Intel Mac Mini, which I’ve owned from new, and I think it’s fair to say that this has been quite heavily upgraded - so first up I upgraded the CPU from a 1.83GHz 32-bit Core Duo to a 2.33GHz 64-bit Core 2 Duo. I’ve also upgraded the RAM from its supposed maximum of 2GB to 4GB with the help of a hacked firmware, and I’ve also put a 1TB SSD in there.
But, if you saw that previous video all about those upgrades, you’ll know that there was one thing that eluded me - and that was the GPU. Of course, this thing has integrated graphics, and it has not particularly good integrated graphics, even for 2007 - and as you’ll probably know, when it comes to this kind of thing, I’m not the kind of person to admit defeat.
So I went onto eBay and I bid on some stuff, and as is quite often the case, I ended up winning quite a bit of that stuff! So yeah, we certainly have a fair few options to test here.
So in this video, I’d like to see if I can finally get to the bottom of my eGPU conundrum - but first things first, let’s take the Mac Mini apart.
Again.
So this is our one and only expansion option in the original Intel Mac Mini - it is of course a mini PCIe slot and it’s a first generation slot, it’s an X1 so it’s not even a particularly fast one, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be able to connect an external GPU to it using some kind of interface which I have experimented with before so this is going to be the starting point once more for our experiments - and this is the one that I wanted to get working in my previous video, it’s called an EXP GDC Beast and it came highly recommended back in the day, mainly for people wanting to add an external PCI Express slot to their Intel MacBooks - so I thought this should be particularly compatible, but if you remember the previous video I had a problem with the cable.
Now I’m very pleased to report that the new cable has arrived with the new interface - so let’s get this wired up and see if it works.
…and the recommended method for powering the Beast is, of course, an equally beasty power supply - so I’ve got this 8-pin Dell server PSU, I think it is, but that’s all hooked up there. What I have in here is the original WiFi card in an adapter so we’re going from MiniPCIe to PCIe back to MiniPCIe, which sounds like a very strange and convoluted setup but I thought, well, what better way of proving that the whole interface thing is actually working? So let’s just try it out…
…it would be helpful if I plugged in the actual power cable - there we go…
…and that is a good noise! That means that the Mac Mini is happy and it’s going to continue to boot.
…and if I just check the list of WiFi networks, there we go, we’re detecting the usual 3 networks that I have available at the studio here so that means that that’s all working and we can proceed to the next step and try a GPU in there.
Right, so GPU number one that we have here is the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT - and the reason I picked this specific GPU is because it was offered as one of the original options in the Mac Pro - the first generation Intel Mac Pro, which was the same generation as this Mac Mini - so I thought, well, maybe that’s compatible? It’s got to be worth a try.
This is the problem that I was running into before - so the Mac Mini actually refuses to boot with a GPU in the slot - it doesn’t make that nice “bong” noise, the white screen doesn’t come up - so I think we can count that one as a failure.
So I went back to the comments section on that initial upgrade video, and there were quite a few people, including DJ Hoffman himself - shout out to the Hoff - suggesting that they actually made versions of these cards with a Mac firmware, which I was kind of vaguely aware of, but I didn’t really think would make all that much difference in this specific setup but I thought, you know what? That first card with the PC firmware didn’t work, so we’ll just buy the Mac version - and I actually bid on two of these, if you’ve noticed, and ended up winning both of them for next to nothing so I now have two of these cards. Should we see if at least one of them works? Let’s give it a go…
…and again, no “bong”, no white screen - so I think we can count that one as a failure as well.
So I went back to the comments section and quite a few people were pointing out, quite rightly, that ATI cards, now of course owned by AMD, historically have better compatibility with the Mac than the NVIDIA cards and to be honest, I am running Linux on this thing as well, and the driver situation with AMD cards is a bit less complicated than it is with NVIDIA cards as well - so actually it’s probably my preference. This is a 2600 XT, it’s from a slightly later model of Mac Pro, and it is indeed running the Apple firmware, so let’s give this one a go.
Ooh!
OK, well the fan slowed right down, so evidently something has happened, but again, no “bong”, no white screen.
OK, evidently PCI Express is not working for us, so back again to the comments, and there’s a suggestion, in fact there’s actually quite a few really good suggestions here from a regular viewer and commenter, xPLAYn, but the very last one is to do with PCI, rather than PCI Express.
Why not? Let’s try a completely different interface - so I picked this up on AliExpress, it’s a MiniPCIe to dual PCI adapter, as suggested, let’s get this installed and give that a try. Why not!?
Well, this is quite the situation, isn’t it? So I think what we have before us here may well be the very first Mac Mini in history with PCI slots - and the PCI graphics card that I have in here is a Radeon HD 5450 which is historically a very interesting PCI graphics card - and I actually bought this for a completely separate project, which we’ll be featuring on the channel at some point in the near future.
So if you want to see that, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button down below, but without further ado, let’s see what happens with this one…
…and again, absolutely nothing.
…just one moment…
Yeah, so don’t get overexcited - I have just unplugged this just to test that I haven’t actually broken the Mac Mini, but it is still working perfectly fine.
Yeah, we are kind of starting to run out of options here.
In all honesty, that was the point in my experiments when I was just ready to give up - I thought, you’ve already wasted far too much time and far too much money on this stupid experiment, it’s never going to work, just stick all of those cards back up on eBay where they came from and get on with something else, like trying to run Windows 11 on a Pentium 4 or some of the other stupid stuff that I get up to on my channel - and I thought, well, surely the integrated graphics can’t be that bad - and I’ve got this much faster CPU, I’ve got 4GB of RAM now, so maybe there’s something on Steam that I can actually play on this and show off on the channel so it’s all not been for nothing - and so I went on to Steam and I rediscovered one of my favourite games from 2007, Portal. I love Portal, I loved it so much back in the day, and of course this was the actual computer that I had in 2007.
But I didn’t play it on my Mac Mini at the time - and the reason for that, of course, being entirely honest - is because there just wasn’t a chance it would ever run a game like this. I mean, I actually went out and bought the Xbox 360 version in the end, and that memory has made me all the more determined to try to get this working!
So it was at this point I went online and I started doing some digging - digging specifically for technical information all about the Intel 945GM chipset used in the 2007 Mac Mini, and I came across some quite interesting old forum posts. Forum posts from people - not even specifically Mac users, but just people with systems with this same 945GM chipset - who’d upgraded to 4GB of RAM and were running into some quite interesting issues.
The Intel 945GM was one of the very first desktop 64-bit chipsets that supported the Core 2 Duo - and if you upgrade it to its theoretical maximum of 4GB of RAM there’s actually some stuff that’s being allocated to that top gigabyte of RAM - stuff to do with PCI Express resource allocation, Base Address Registers, that kind of thing, and one of the side effects of this is that the system only sees 3GB of that 4GB - apparently it’s fine and the OS can work around it using the basic hardware, but once you actually start plugging in complex things like GPUs that need bigger mappings, bigger address spaces, and that kind of thing, that’s when you start to run into trouble.
And what I’m essentially getting to here is - well why don’t I just downgrade the RAM? I mean, I’ve got nothing else to lose, let’s try it!
…I don’t know, after all that effort with that hacked firmware in the first video so we could go over and above what Steve Jobs wanted for this machine and stick 4GB of RAM in it - we’re downgrading back to the original 2GB. But hey, if it makes this work, it has to be worth it.
I’m not going to miss plugging that thing back in, that’s for sure!
And I think for the best shot of this actually working, I’m going to go with the 2600 XT out of that first generation Intel Mac Pro because I think that should be the most compatible card, and it should give us the best chance of actually getting something working.
Ah!
It works!
…and I think that makes the 2600 XT somewhat of a success by my own admittedly quite low standards - I mean, the Mac is quite happy to boot up with it in the slot - alright, it turned out that wasn’t the GPU’s fault in the end, but I didn’t know that at the time - we can see all of those initial boot screens because it is running the official Apple firmware. It’s a little bit sluggish and a little bit laggy…
[This is an HP Touchpad, a device that infamously lasted less than two months on the market back in 2011]
…and I can even go into Steam and I can fire up a game of Portal. Unfortunately, that’s where things take a bit of a turn - so the game itself took five minutes just to get to this initial menu screen and as you can see from the on screen FPS counter, even on this very, very simple scene, it’s not going to be playable at all and If I actually try to start a game, it just crashes out completely, and I can’t actually get in and play Portal, which is the thing that I want to do. But, that’s enough of a proof of concept, I think, for me to go out and splash out a little bit more money on a much better card - so, which card did I decide to go with in the end as a long term solution for this setup? Well…
What I have here is a Radeon HD 5770 - this is a card from 2009, it has 1GB on board, so four times as much as our little 2600 XT here - and this was sold as an official upgrade for the Mac Pro by Apple, with Apple firmware, and I think this is the card that I’m going to use - so let’s try this one out and see what the performance is like!
So we’ll just switch this off…
…remove our trusty 2600 XT - and our 5770 actually requires external power, that’s how much of a beast of a card it is - so I’m going to use this cable just from the GDC thingy here - so that just plugs into the end there, and then the card- it plugs into the card on this end…
…like that, and that plugs into the slot.
Finally we can fire up our external power once more…
Oh, that would probably be useful, wouldn’t it!
So this all seems to be working perfectly fine, which is probably to be expected as this is also an Apple OEM card, but great to confirm that the 5770 is indeed working - and when we get to the desktop, let’s fire up a web browser and see what YouTube looks like.
[This is an HP Touchpad, a device that infamously lasted less than two months on the market back in 2011]
And oh my goodness that is absolutely perfect isn’t it!? That is a real night and day difference compared to that last card - but of course the big question is how well does it run Portal? 2007’s biggest game and indeed a game that this Mac Mini could only have ever dreamed of running when it was new.
Well, I am very pleased to report that this is a silky smooth 60FPS experience - this is so nice to play, I’ve played a few minutes of this through the first few levels and it’s been an absolute joy. I’m going to have so much fun revisiting one of my favourite games of all time on this system.
Just in the name of transparency and honesty, I will point out that I did get myself into a situation where I could see myself through multiple portals and the frame rate did drop down into the twenties but to be honest that was how it was back in the day anyway and there’s not really much you can do about that so very, very pleased with this and it’s performing absolutely brilliantly which I can barely believe myself and I’m so pleased that I stuck with this and actually managed to get to this point.
So this is definitely the card that I’m going to be pairing with this system - and I did mention the price earlier and that I was willing to spend a little bit more than that original 2600 XT to get this level of performance so I suppose I should reveal that as well. How much did the 5770 set me back?
It was £20 on eBay, which was less than half of the cost of that 2600 XT - so work that one out!
So my thoughts of course turn to aesthetics - I mean, look at all this lovely shiny Apple hardware - and in the middle of it, we’ve got a bare GPU with a load of cables and things hanging out of it, which isn’t a great look, is it? I mean, I quite like it, but yeah, I think as a complete setup, we need to tidy this up a bit. So I did some more online shopping as I do, and I found something else!
This is an eGPU enclosure, and I think it’s going to be absolutely ideal - I think it’s going to look really nice sat on the desk next to the rest of this setup, so this is what I’m going to go with, but there is a minor problem with this - you see, this card came out of a Mac Pro which means that it has a rather ridiculously large metal bracket attached to it - but I think that’s something we can solve…
Hmm, right - so here is said metal bracket - that is well and truly metal. But I don’t think this actually has any kind of thermal properties at all, I think this is literally just something to do with how it slotted into that original Mac Pro case - and there’s a little bit there, obviously we’ve got the power connector in the back there - and I have seen the PC version of this card and it’s basically identical but without this back part - but I think this does do something so unfortunately I can’t just remove this - I think it is actually quite structural and does help to hold all of this stuff together - but I guess we’ll find out when I remove the screws. I want to repaste this anyway, cause this is 15 years old now so I’m sure the old thermal compound will have gone bad by this point.
So let’s just take all of these screws out.
So, I think the best place to trim this is going to be flush with the back of the PCB here - obviously I don’t want to do that with this in place, so I guess if I take some more of these screws out, these two parts will probably separate? Let’s give it a go…
Ah! Oh! Okay, well, that was easy - so, what do we have here? Right, we have some thermal pads - I guess they’re the RAM chips on the back - so we don’t want to lose those. I’m not sure whether I should paste these or stick with the original pads - I think what I’ll do is stick with the original pads because they still seem okay apart from that one which has a bit of a split along the edge - I’ll stick that back together.
There’s also this top part here - how’s that going to work?
A-ha!
So this is what we started with - and this is what we have now! If only it was that easy - and I’m sure many of you are sat there thinking,
“But Rees, surely you could have just bought the PC version of this card and just flashed it with the Apple firmware?” and you’re absolutely right - I could have done that.
So now, the only remaining question is, have I ruined this priceless, £20, eBay vintage graphics card for nothing - and the answer to that question is…
…no! It still works!
Right, so, it turns out that this thing is quite the contraption - the actual interface itself is very similar to the EXP GDC Beast that I was using before, it does come with its own little MiniPCIe adapter, which is slightly different to that one, but I’ve plugged that in, had this all connected up, it’s all working great.
It also supports our 8-pin Dell power supply so that’s fantastic, I know that’s all working. But I’m just trying to work out how this all fits together, and I think I’m about there - so it was actually fitted onto this thick plastic base and that had some feet on it as well, which I’ve also taken off - and it looks like the screw holes here should kind of line up about there ish…
…and then I think the card, I think that…
Yeah, that looks like it’s all going to work - so I shall forge ahead with this, and then we need to work out how the wiring’s going to work - there is quite a bit of space in the back, and there’s also a little outlet thing here, as well as above the card at the top, and it also comes, just like the Beast, with an external power cable for the card. This actually supports two 6-pin connectors but I only need the one - so I’ll probably, if it doesn’t fit in neatly, I might end up chopping one of those off. But yeah, we’ll see how we get on.
[A few minutes later]
Problem - it seems that those ports, which we actually need to hook this thing up, aren’t actually going to line up with the hole - it’s almost like it was designed to not have this piece of foam here - so was I supposed to use that? It’s about the same thickness? I don’t really want metal on metal.
Hmm, Okay.
[A little longer than a few minutes later]
Right, now, in my defence I didn’t actually get any kind of manual or anything like that with this enclosure, so I am kind of making it up as I go along, but I think, I think, what I was supposed to do was to keep this original plastic base part with the interface attached to it and actually remove the original metal base of the enclosure, and then this seems to sit about right on there so I’m basically taking the ends of the enclosure and bolting them to this thing - and then hopefully it should all go together - so wish me luck!
Okay, so things are happening, I think - I’ve got this cable in, I’ve cable tied all of that together, I had to hack a bit of this plastic off the front which I wasn’t really all that enamoured with as a solution but it’s kind of made it all fit together although the graphics card is actually going to be a kind of a structural part of the whole thing now, but whatever, whatever. The important thing is that it does all at least look like it should fit together now - so let’s just try this on for size…
Right, I think that can be persuaded.
So here it is, possibly the world’s first 2007 first generation polycarbonate Intel Mac Mini with an eGPU setup. Why? Well, why not? Sometimes the journey of getting this stuff working is enough of a reward in and of itself - and it really has been a journey, and it certainly has been rewarding - so I hope you’ve enjoyed joining me nearly half as much as I have actually setting this thing up.
I will point out because I’m sure some of you will have had the same thought about the RAM. I did try it with 3GB and unfortunately it doesn’t boot up with 3GB of RAM, 2GB is the maximum if I want to use it with the GPU - and to be honest, for games of this era, 2GB is more than enough, so that’s not really a problem.
Speaking of games of this era, this is the Half Life 2 Lost Coast graphics stress test demo from 2005. This is absolutely maxing out this GPU. Yes, it is dropping the odd frame here or there. You’ve probably noticed. Probably spotted that. But to be honest, you know, these huge open areas with all this reflective water and stuff, that’s probably to be expected.
And as a whole, it’s, it’s running absolutely great. I’m really, really pleased with this setup - so all that’s left for this video is to thank my supporters on Patreon, Ko fi, and indeed my YouTube channel members - and of course, a big thank you to you as well for joining me - so hopefully I’ll see you next time.
Original Video Links
Support the channel!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ctrlaltrees
Become a Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe7aGwKsc40TYqDJfjggeKg/join
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/ctrlaltrees
Relevant Links:
Apple GPU Compatibility List: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/gpu-compatibility-list-for-cmp.2174600
EXP GDC Beast eGPU Interface: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006284934523.html
Mini PCI to 2x PCI Interface: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005114146735.html
eGPU Interface: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004833260603.html
eGPU Enclosure: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005699173776.html
“Maxxed Mini” Mac Mini Upgrade Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSKK7ZjhkC4
Portal Teaser Trailer (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluRVBhmf8w
Action Retro HP TouchPad video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7dVE96_75U
If you liked this video please consider subscribing to ctrl.alt.rees on YouTube!
