Whether it's "worth it" or not depends on what you want to do with the thing. I'm in the midst right now of giving my 2006 Mac Mini a fourth lease on life. It started out as my main machine, but it struggled too much with the games I wanted to play. Then it was an HTPC for a time, but it was too loud (mostly its optical drive). After replacing it with a PC with no moving parts, I repurposed the Mini as a file server. That was the perfect role for it, and it performed that task for 13 years! Over time, USB 2 became too painfully slow, though, so it sat in a closet for the last three years. Now I'm hoping to turn it into a headless MIDI emulator for my old DOS gaming systems (emulating Roland MT-32, etc..) Granted I could get an old thin client to do this, but there's nothing special about them. Using a 17-year-old Mac as a MIDI emulator is just more interesting.
I had managed to upgrade my Mac mini to a C2D T7400 and 4GB of RAM, seems like all of it is accessible by macOS. Runs Lion reasonably well, and I actually got Mountain Lion and Mavericks running too, but either has their own set of issues, namely that no apps like iMessage or FaceTime would work on either, and sleep mode doesn't work on Mavericks.
I always have used it as an HTPC, upgraded it a few years back with 4 GB RAM and SSD. Didn't know cpu could be upgraded also. Now it's running Linux Mint 21.1 quite ok and thinking of making it a web server also.
One of these is probably comparable to a Raspberry Pi in terms of what the hardware is capable of. It seems like a fun weekend project to take one of these and put Linux on it and upgrade it.
I was thinking about buying this one, but eventually haven't found any real usage for it. I guess I'll pass. The case is really nice though. Might be a good shell for Raspberry Pi or something :)
I just bought a 2006 Mac Mini so I could play my favorite games again like Diablo 2, Civilization 3 Complete ( I hated the upgrades ) and other games. I am afraid to upgrade the browser for fear I wont be able to play my games. It has 10.6 on it and I cannot get on the web. Any help you can give me would be appreciated. I will be adding a 1 tb ssd to it and maybe memory and a new cpu ( gpu ? I always get them confused. I am 71 and used to KNOW this stuff but now I forget stuff. ). Thanks for posting the video and I subscribed.
Nice video. This was the first mac I ever owned back in the day and I did a similar upgrade to the CPU and managed to get Mavericks on it IIRC. Terrible graphics even at the time though! Wonder if the Geekbench results issues were down to an outdated browser?
Could be! I did a quick scan around to see if I could get an updated browser as well, but in the end, I am pretty sure the Geekbench results would tell us what we already know - the GPU is killing the performance. It was a stark difference vs the iMac, and the GPU in that thing isn't even good!
I used the t7200 because it was diiirt cheap to test out. If you want to venture down this path be sure you don't spend too much on the CPU, since the GPU is the bottleneck ;)
They are OK as a Mac OS X Tiger system. I had one in 2006 but it died some years ago, I've just bought a new unit to "play" with OS X Tiger with old intel and PPC apps.
I have a 2006 model Mac mini that I upgraded the HDD to SSD and and it has 2gb of ram. I installed Steam on it and my kid uses it for playing "edu-tainment games". We've had no problems with any of the issues you mention...but then I also got rid of apple OS and installed windows 7 on it. I think THAT would be what's holding yours back. I'm most likely going to benchmark the current system as-is and then do the 2.33ghz processor upgrade and re-test. I'll let you know what the results are if you're interested.
They can be, but that 32bit EFI makes installing Linux just... a bit unfriendly. Most of the online guides also fall back to 'burn a CD' which is sad, because most new distros won't fit on a CD, or in my case, I don't have any burnable CDs or a CD burner even! So, the Raspberry PI wins the day here as well.
