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2006 mac mini mods??

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If I'm reading the wikipedia page correctly you should definitely be good with any of the kabylake chips.
 
Okay!! Little update here. I got my Deskmini and went to work almost straight away! First, I disassembled the mac mini, got rid of the aluminium plate under the motherboard and blocked the rear I/O holes with masking tape and applied epoxy while keeping the air vents and the power switch open:
IMG_1966.jpg

After the curing time I used the I/O shield I got with the deskmini as a guide and marked the new holes location:
IMG_1968.jpg IMG_1967.jpg

I then used a dremel to roughly cut the plastic/epoxy within the marked areas:
IMG_1971.jpg

To make sure I could line up the connections with the holes I removed the motherboard standoffs from the Deskmini case and bolted them to the board and mated the 2 parts for the first time. There was a happy man at this point!! ;) I had to remove about 2 millimetres to the rear right one to get the right height and I used the ledge of the rear left part of the case to rest the other side of the board. I then glued the standoffs with epoxy and let cure for half an hour.
IMG_1970.jpg IMG_1972.jpg

After checking things out, I was afraid the HDMI cable would not go far enough in the connector because of the width of the plastic/epoxy rear I/O. I decided to widen the hole and while at it I took the time to finish the other ones so it looks better when you look at the back of the mini:
IMG_1981.jpg IMG_1980.jpg

I then sanded the surface and taped the rest of the case bottom part just before it occurred to me I was about to forget the antennas. So I drilled 2 more holes, sanded and cleaned for the second time. Now it's ready for primer:
IMG_1982.jpg IMG_1983.jpg

After the primer was cured I lightly sanded and applied off white paint to try and match the rest of the base:
IMG_1984.jpg

After that it was just a matter of putting back the board, the antennas screws and the original power button back in:
IMG_1985.jpg IMG_1986.jpg IMG_1987.jpg

I'm pretty happy of the result right now and cannot wait for the rest of the parts to come! Please tell me what you think or/if you have suggestions!
 
After lurking the net for many hours for the best deal on a cpu I finally found a 6500t for a steal! I would've preferred a baby lake generation but reading it can be tricky to hackintosh made me change my mind. I also bought a 240Gb SSD with a bracket I'm going to mod to fit in the upper part of the case and a K199 cooler + 2x4Gb of memory. Just waiting for everything to be delivered!!!!
 
Nice! I have a 6500T in my cube build and I've been pretty happy with it. Nice cool chip with a decent amount of power.
 
Nice! I have a 6500T in my cube build and I've been pretty happy with it. Nice cool chip with a decent amount of power.

I'm happy to hear that! I was worried it might not be enough for movie streaming!
 
While waiting for the parts to come in I took the time to figure things out for the SSD location, the front dvd slot and routed some wiring. The SSD is glued with hot glue to the metal part of the upper case. I know it's not ideal but I have no good ideas at this point on how to mount it so it would not interfere with the cooler and the ram. I routed the data cable so I can lift the cover and put it on its side while stile plugged:
IMG_1997.jpg The blue and white wires are for the power leds and they are attached to the red and black wires you can see in the picture above. I'm not too happy with the final result but with the small space available that was the best I could do.

I used the original power led of the mini and hooked the activity wires to it so I didn't had much to do for this other than route and hide the wires:
IMG_1992.jpg IMG_1991.jpg IMG_1993.jpg

After that I took care of the power switch. As I said in a previous post, I wanted to keep the original switch so I routed the brown and white wires to it and made a custom connector with garbage ties and shrink tube:
IMG_1994.jpg IMG_1995.jpg

I also blocked the dvd slot with a small plexi that I sanded, I the applied foil at the back to give it the same look as the original case and to reflect some of the light that will come from the blue leds I glued at each end:IMG_1999.jpg

Now I just need to test in the dark and take a picture for you guys! ;) Can't wait for the rest of the parts to get here!
 
Hi guys! The cd slot leds are not working the way I want so I've abandoned the idea for now. I also had to remove the SSD's case because it was hitting the ram just enough to bend the case. I wrapped the board with electrical tape and then glued back at the same place. So far I don't have any other ideas to fix that "problem".

I've pretty much completed this build and I was wondering what programs I should run to test the hardware performance?
 
Hi guys! The cd slot leds are not working the way I want so I've abandoned the idea for now. I also had to remove the SSD's case because it was hitting the ram just enough to bend the case. I wrapped the board with electrical tape and then glued back at the same place. So far I don't have any other ideas to fix that "problem".

I've pretty much completed this build and I was wondering what programs I should run to test the hardware performance?

The most common benchmarks are:
Geekbench
Cinebench
LuxMark
Unigine Heaven
Unigine Valley

If you want to test for stability, you can try running the Prime95 "torutre test" for a few hours with these settings:
Screen Shot 2019-01-03 at 8.01.55 AM.png
Another app that I run to test stability is Handbrake. I queue up a bunch of videos and set it to convert them to Super HQ 1080p. Then let it run overnight.
 
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