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New Thermal Paste in Old Mac mini

l008com

l008com

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 20, 2002
Messages
374
I have this old 2011 Mac mini I'm using as a retro games machines. Its the only Mac mini ever made that had discrete graphics, I think its an AMD 6630m. Its 15 years old but I'm only playing old games so its ideal. I keep it in my bedroom plugged in to my TV.

So here's the problem. For what I'm doing with it, it should be an absolute champ, based on benchmarks

But in reality, it starts raining in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and the fan maxes out and the GPU chokes and the framerate absolutely tanks. And this is San Andreas. I should be able to play GTA4 on this mini!

I'm thinking I should start by replacing the thermal paste. But given the limited total cooling capacity (one smallish heatsink and one small fan), should I use some kind of "high end" thermal paste? Or is all thermal paste pretty much going to work the same? Like companies selling gold plated digital HDMI cables for better video quality :p

I have some unopened paste here that came with.... something... once. Its still sealed but I have no idea where it came from. I don't think its as old as the mini but its at least a few years old.

Being a Mac guy, I don't deal with thermal stuff like this very often. In Mac IT for over 20 years and I could count all of the CPUs I've ever replaced on my fingers.

Its also possible that this is some kind of windows 10 glitch. Although given the times in game when it happens, it seems to pretty legitimately be just overheating GPU or GPU/CPU.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+mini+Mid+2011+Teardown/6131
The teardown looks pretty easy. I've taken a million Mac minis apart over the years, and it looks like a few extra torx and the heat sink pops right off.
 
The unopened stuff I have is Protronix Series 7 thermal paste. And giving it more thought, I'm pretty sure this stuff isn't that old after all. No more than 5 years and probably less than that. >3.17W/(m-K) *whatever that means*
 
ok. there a q in there somewhere?
last time i did a couple of them i just used mx5.
 
If you're going to take the trouble to repaste it, I'd think it would be worth it to buy some fresh paste. Something like Kryonaut if you don't mind the price, or Arctic mx4 / mx6.
 
Yeah, either put a good paste that will not squeeze out for another 5 years, or use something like thermal grizzly phasesheet that will have excellent performance and also last a long time.
 
Well thats a bummer. I cleaned off the old paste, put on new paste, tested it out, and no change. At all. I also used some canned air and cleaned out what little dust there was in the fan and in the heatsink fins.

It doesn't make sense to me that this AMD 6630m is effectively just as powerful as an nVidia 320m. But in order to not get laggy, I have to lower the GTA:SA graphical settings down to the same settings I use on the 320m. At higher settings, it plays fine for a minute, then the fan starts maxing out and I start dropping major frames.

I will say this though, the new paste looked a little more pasted and a little less creamy than I would have expected. So maybe I buy some of the good stuff and do this all over again at some point. Or maybe I just give up and go back to the 320m mini.

Is there a free utility I can use in windows that will graph GPU temp, CPU temp and fan speed? And maybe show that little graph in a floating window on top of a full screen game window, so I can see whats going on in real time? Maybe windows 10 is doing something weird with the CPU, maxing it out doing god knows what and its the CPU thats throttling due to temp, not the GPU.

Also while testing, I booted macos and ran an NES emulator with the SABR pixel smoothing and it not only ran great, but it ran that so cool, the fan didn't even speed up. At all. And that smoothing filter is intense (for 15 year old computers). So maybe my solution is to do this again with even better paste, or maybe my solution is to erase the windows side of this computer and downgrade it to windows 7. Or hell, maybe XP for that matter, all I'm playing on the windows side is GTA3, VC, SA and hopefully 4. Everything else is on the mac side.

2011mini.jpg
 
What did you use? Some tim need to be broken in (several good heat/cool cycles) before it really works.
 
Nobu said:
What did you use? Some tim need to be broken in (several good heat/cool cycles) before it really works.
Click to expand...
I used the stuff I had sealed on my desk. I don't think its as old as I originally thought. I will be using this Mac nightly so it will get cycled a lot, we'll see if it improves. It was protronix series 7
 
pendragon1 said:
from the amazon reviews
View attachment 799711
Click to expand...
4.6 out of 5 stars with 588 ratings. I don't think I bought it from amazon because its not in my order history. And my syringe was WAY smaller than that one :D
I'll have to run that monitoring software and see whats happening because I'm starting to wonder if the GPU is fine but the CPU is whats causing the overheating.
 
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