Enhancing Mac Mini with thermal compound is a smart choice.
Enhancing Mac Mini with thermal compound is a smart choice.
Today I realized I’ve reached my limit with the Mac mini’s fan speed climbing to 4400 and even 5400 RPM during video uploads, YouTube streaming in 1080p60, gaming sessions with Porting Kit Windows, and more. I suspect MacOS Sierra played a role, but I also thought about how the thermal solutions for the CPU and GPU might have lost effectiveness after soldering them onto the board. Using my tools—thanks to Linus for his ongoing iFixit content—I managed to squeeze everything into the compact case, flipped the board, removed the heat synchronization for both GPU and CPU, took out the old thermal paste, installed the MX-4 Arctic Thermal (a non-conductive type), reassembled it, and then ran a stress test.
I opted for a free approach instead of buying specialized software, so I asked the Terminal to repeatedly output “yes” across all threads. The test lasted about five minutes, and it worked: the new compound held up, preventing the CPU from overheating to 4400RPM and dropping from 78°C to 73°C when it hit that threshold. This is great news. I still need to verify raw upload performance, RAM behavior, and PortingKit results, but I’ll keep you updated.
Here are some useful screenshots from my Google Drive (feel free to check them out):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwaQzL0...sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwaQzL0...sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwaQzL0...sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwaQzL0...sp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwaQzL0...sp=sharing
I hope this update is helpful. If you have questions about my process or want alternative stress-test ideas, just let me know! Unfortunately, I don’t have data from before the new compound, but I can confirm that my CPU thermal throttled to 75% usage in MONIT. Edit: My Mac Mini model is the Mac Mini 5.2 (mid-2011); I upgraded it with a Mercury 6G 240GB SSD and 8GB DDR3 1333MHz Crucial memory. The GPU is a Radeon 6630M, soldered directly onto the board. I assume the CPU is a Sandy Bridge Core i5-2520M with dual cores and hyper-threading.
i have a 2009 mac mini with a loud fan and a broken dvd drive. i’m thinking about swapping out the entire heatsink for something really big—like a massive scythe ninja if i can find one.
I omitted this step since I use dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null on Unix systems. Running it across all available terminals causes the CPU to operate at full capacity.
It doesn't seem that way. The process mainly runs x86 instructions without any major delays from storage devices or other factors.