When I first bought my Mac Mini, and moved away from the PC world, I thought I was saying goodbye to any future hardware upgrades I could make. Fortunately, I soon discovered that you could actually upgrade several things on the Mac Mini including the RAM, the hard drive, the optical drive, and the CPU. Naturally, all of these void your warranty, but when you want that extra bit of power out of your mini, and you know what you’re doing, that won’t stop you.
After reading a lot on several Mac forums, I finally decided that upgrading the RAM would be the easiest and most cost effective thing I could do for the biggest boost in performance. I followed a great guide on how to open the Mac Mini and upgrade the RAM, and I was on my way. My 1.83Ghz Core 2 Duo Mac Mini with 1GB of RAM went to 2GB, and it cost me a lot less than what it would have it if had taken it to the Apple Store, or purchased the 2GB on the machine to start.
Now, I find myself wanting to upgrade the CPU. Prices on the T7600 CPU, which would bring my 1.83Ghz Mac Mini to 2.33Ghz, have dropped considerably, and I could probably find one on eBay for about $175 now, making the price per performance ratio a lot more reasonable. A 0.5 Ghz jump would definitely be noticable in terms of performance, and although this upgrade would be a lot more difficult that the RAM upgrade, my hesitation is mainly due to all the rumours I’ve read about the future of the Mac Mini. Many sites have reported that a new Mac Mini is in the works, and now that the MacBooks have new video cards in them, the new Mac Mini would more than likely have these exact video cards too. I’m thinking that it might be wiser to keep my money now, buy a new Mac Mini if one comes out before next Fall, and sell on my current Mac Mini. It would probably be the most cost-effective Mac upgrade I could make, provided that Apple does in fact do something with the Mac Mini. If not, I guess I’ll have to stick with a MacBook, which wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world.
