This is a blast from the past! I picked one of these up when back 2010 just as they announced the new model. The new model came with a price hike so I was happy when I saw a store getting rid of this at a discount. It was a pretty good media centre for its time with Front Row (and later Plex). Can't say I am fond of Apple today, but I have fond memories of this little box.
Depending on your model, I think Sierra would work a bit better, I had El Capitan on my Mac Pro and it was barely useable, I used dosdude1’s SIerra Patcher and it made my Mac work a lot better, especially the graphics (my graphics is 8800GT) I don’t know about the 9400M
There's an issue with the 2009 (and earlier) Mac minis and SSDs. The computers use a buggy Nvidia MCP79 SATA controller that is picky about the SSDs it works with. Or to be more precise, any SSD will work, but only certain SSDs will actually run at the full 3Gb/s speed available - the others will only run at 1.5Gb/s. This is due to the Nvidia SATA controller in the Mac mini not negotiating correctly with the controller inside the SSD. SSDs that use a Marvell controller will work at full speed, but many popular SSDs have different controllers and so will only run at 1.5Gb/s in a pre-2010 Mac mini (the mini's onboard SATA controller was changed with the 2010 refresh and so the issue went away).
This type of video is priceless and RU-vidrs like Modstek are far more relevant than most high end content providers like LTT and J2C because what he shows and does is within the reach of pretty much everyone. Whilst I enjoy watching videos of the latest £1200 GFX cards and £600 CPUs they are massively outside of my budget whereas this type of content is well within reach. Keep up the good work
If I had money I would still tinker with this kind of stuff. Building a computer with new parts to me is not as fun and wouldn't keep my mind busy that long. When I bust into some older tech I can wonder what the Person used it for and so on.
If I had the cash to tinker with all the high end stuff then obviously I would do that but I would imagine less than 10% of all views on the "big channels" are from people that can afford them. I find myself far more enjoying your videos, RandomGaminginHD and Tech Yes City amongst others far more because they are aimed more at the mainstream tech user. Dont get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of the content in LTT, J2C etc but I look at the prices for the hardware they use and its just not anything I will be using in the next 3 to 5 years or even longer. I can watch your content knowing I can go out and pick up that hardware and, by and large, do what you do. That makes the content much more relevant, the hardware is tangible today.
Just like to let you know that I have subscribed to your channel and grown fond of your content. Your ability to inspire those who need an inspiration on how to take something apart as simple as a game system or maybe figuring out the whole layout. So I like to say thank you for all your dedication and hard work that you put into your videos. In other words keep up the good work that you do for the RU-vid Community and have a good evening.
@@modstek You are welcome and enjoy watching your videos. I'm a gamer and still play my original Xbox. There are some games that are not comparable with the Xbox 360 and enjoy Forza 4. I've recently been driving in the game a Ford T Bird 1957 model and made it look like a hot rod. Both Gran Turismo and Forza series has amazing graphics racing games.
Phew its a little tight in there! Iv always liked mac minis, and was even given one from my boss of my current job so I could accuratley debug stuff on safari, but I have to say even though the spec was good (i5, 8gb ram etc) it always felt much much slower that my main system which was also a same generation i5) I eventually gave it to my brother who loves it and uses it as his main system but once he's ready for something new ill be hacking the thing to bits in true modstek style thats fo' sho'!
Do you know any tutorial that teaches you how to install MAC OS through USB connection. My MAC MINI A1176 2007. I was unable to do this after installing an SSD in place of the HD
Hi I'm French and I do the same think with a same Mac mini of lat 2009 but I see that you put ddr3 1300mhz ram inside. The original ram was a ddr3 1067mhz ram did it works better ? Thanks
Hi, I wonder if you can give a clue: I have a Mac mini 1.1 that I got since the previous owner claimed it didn't work anymore. Actually it boots (sometimes) but inevitably after few minutes (random from 1 to less than 10) it just hangs. The screen stays on, but the Mac is completely frozen. So far I've managed to upgrade the CPU and transform it to a 2.1, changed the RAM, changed the battery, even upgrade the HDD to SSD and install the last version of Mac OS supported by Mac mini 2.1 the 10.7 but still no difference. It still freezes. I also monitored the CPU and internal Temperature using an utility and everything seems fine, no hell inside. I have no more clue, there's definitely something wrong with it but I don't know what look for. Do you have any suggestion? Thanks.
Yes I bought it used from eBay and the damage was there already. It looked as if they upgraded the ram once before me. Greetings to you as well from the Gulf Coast
@@jamesfrain8318 everyone knows thatit is external gpu but it is impossible. There is no way to make it working on this machine. The first mac mini to be able to use epgu is 2011 model
Been following the channel for a minute. Good stuff. Next step for the upgrade, get that thing running high sierra (10.13). Not a difficult task to do. Here's a link for the patch tool. dosdude1.com/highsierra/ The late 2009 Macbook has the exact same specs and has official support so there isn't going to be stability issues.
You're in luck its achievable as long as you have a minimum of 2gb of ram and a core2duo. Create a bootable ML usb using this patch tool. www.osxhackers.net/macpostfactor.html Then use the patch tool to patch OS after install.
Used super duper to clone my internal HD. Then took out the old one and put in the cloned 500 GIG and 8 mb of Ram original 4 mg. turned on and got the folder with the question mark. Tried the old HD back in again and got the same folder with question mark. Th windows keyboard that has always worked now does not work as I tried alternate keys that are supposed to be equal to the mac and nothing as I am told to try this to re install OS X
I took mine apart and when taking off the two smaller antennas to get out of the way, the one on the right disconnected. I have no clue where it is supposed to connect? help. lol
Not sure how much that fan underneath will do considering that it looks like it has 0 airflow from beneath itself. Might want to raise it a little bit so air can get under and be pushed in the case.
I got an "Apple CD player"from an auction, actually a late 2009 Mini. In went 8 Gigs of ram, but I have to use the 512G SSD with an external USB adapter. All the new ones are 6G transfer speed, which this old Mini can't handle internally. This makes a very usable second system.
Love the channel. I might have asked you this before, but, i have an old i7 920 2.6 CPU in an old gigabyte X58 MB,with 16 gig of DDR3 1600 ram. Can you recommend any upgrades i could do, apart from an SSD which i'm saving up for. I tell you what man, this 11 year old system i run can still handle most games, i play PCars2 and a lot of modern FPS games, and still get 60 to 160 fps depending.
I think this is a great chip for the price www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-X5675-3-06GHz-Six-Core-SLBYL-AT80614006696AA-Processor-w-Grease/272516757168?epid=109625040&hash=item3f7343b6b0:g:sLoAAOSwMNxXYSrv
Yay, x58 its a great plataform overall. The x5675 its a great chip for overclocking it to 4 ghz on air on all 6 cores. But here is a list of chips that can as well achieve 4 ghz on six cores on this plataform: the w3670, the e5649, the x5660 and the x5670. Any of these chips usually overclock better while being cooler than the i7 980. Just chose one of those and go ham. The only thing i would reccomend is for you to check if your motherboard is compatible with your chip before buying it.
