Unbelievable cool video. Thank you for all you've done for the community of old Mac users, your patches have helped me keep so many of my machines useful!
In 1986 I cut out the 64k of memory from my first Mac and soldered in 128k with guidance from Dr. Dobbs Journal. Thought that was pretty cool but my oh my how times change! Brilliant work, sir, kudos to you!
I've watched this in absolute awe. This is a great work of art I'll never be able to perform. Well done, mate! Keep it up! I'll just save money for my new Mac Mini M2 by the end of the year. There's no way I'll find someone as competent as you to do such a thing and still make it affordable.
It's amazing they sold this machine up until the end of 2018. We still have some of them in our labs. and we specced them pretty well at the time, they had the 2.6ghz i5, 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. They run terribly today on Monterey, and it's officially supported! Yet we have 2012 i5 iMacs with after-market SSDs added and they run like a dream on Monterey using OCLP.
I am writing this from a Mac Mini 2014, 2.6ghz i5, 512GB SSD and 8GB Ram... and I am not agree with your statement "they run terribly today on Monterey". As a matter of fact, it runs smooth. I do Photoshop and Lightroom, Internet, Excel with no problem at all.
From a tinkerer perspective it's amazing what you did there, complete desoldering/reballing/resoldering plus programming of bios, I draw my hat and fully heartily applaud this work and dedication. From a non mac users perspective... why is there no slot for ram and a socket for cpu? Yes I now, new ultrabooks are also guilty of soldered on cpu/ram/ssd, but up till 2013/2014 the larger notebooks still had replaceable cpu/ram and ssds. And desktops, we don't have to talk, they are fully upgradeable in most cases.
It forced you to buy the larger capacity models or ram upgrades at purchase at a significantly higher price, as you could never upgrade. I dare say it perhaps also made them more reliable being soldered ,but I’m not sure to what extent - if any. I was waiting for the 2014 to come out so I could upgrade for a much earlier model, and when it did and I saw the soldered ram and cpu, I immediately bought the just superseded quad core whose ram and storage you could upgrade - and having two more cores was a lot faster.
Yeah, good linux knowledge and non Apple hardware makes life easier. But i love my 2012 airbook which rocks Pop OS and honestly, for many years there were no comparable pc notebooks and still today build quality is impressive. So i understand the attraction of Apple devices.... And the M cpus are impressive again. Wait for mature linux support😉
Some of the older Macs had the ability to change ram and hdd but they where finicky with what ram would work it was nice though, I guess its now a bit of both upselling the higher models instead of user upgradeable plus smaller form factors making it harder to replace.
I can say regarding the CPU as to why they moved away from CPU's in both windows Laptops and MacBook's, One is that it results in an overall thinner devices and the other is from DDR3 based devices - the Signal integrity dependent (rise and fall time of high speed digital signals like DDR3 is very small order of few pico seconds - having a socket CPU adds metal socket pins adds more impedance discontinuities which in turn results in delays / corruption /slows down of these rise / fall times. with a soldered BGA CPU you minimize these impedance anomaly- this is wht they eliminated the socket cpu approach ).
Holy hell! I thought I was cool upgrading my 2012 mini with 16G of RAM and 256 SSD. This is hardcore. Well done! I love my mini! Have Big Sur on it and for daily home stuff it works great. At my work office I have the latest Apple gear. EDIT: Geekbench 704 / 1726 with the i7 / 2.6Ghz / 16G / SSD / 4000 Graphics.
@@abduujabor well you’re not supposed to get Monterey for Mac mini (late 2012) since it’s not “compatible” (which is a stupid lie apple made up) for it. But the thing is, you actually can get it! It’s just that you have to use open core legacy patcher (which is easy to use) and you need a 16+ USB flash drive to be able to use and get Monterey. Here is the link to the video of it happening. It’s actually works and it’s legit. Link: ua-cam.com/video/McmO7xP4wvI/v-deo.html (Edit) I also recommend having 16 gb of ram (which is easy to change and it’s the most a Mac mini can take) to make the experience faster.
Reballing that apu is the most difficult part because of the warping you mentioned, on the 10th gen intel had to glue a metal support bracket to the corners to avoid It
Great job on the hardware upgrades and restoration. I'm sure the switch to an ssd will make overall everyday tasks faster and quieter and cooler operation
More great work thanks Collin. Any chance of showing us the board pre-heater that you use please? Thanks EDIT - I found the answer in one of the comments. Cheers. hot air station, Puhui T8280 preheater, Madell QK853 preheater, and Aoyue 4545W nozzle for doing the large BGAs.
Very impressed by dosdude1's skill and precision. This is way above my pay grade. Will say this: I've a 2012 Mac Mini, the last Mini where both RAM and drives were socketed (not soldered) and so upgrades there were plug and play. The CPU of my old Dell Latitude was not soldered either so upgrading that was also simple for this klutz. All of which is to lament that newer tech, with glued cases and soldered everything, requires dosdude1 level expertise to service.
i think the surface tension of the solder is strong enough to warp the hot chip when you take it off the board with the vacuum pump.try next time to flip it next on a paper towel with tweezers from the sides.i have removed cpus with tweezers aswell with 0.5mm metal blade tool.but overall you are a pro :D .keep up the good work
Great video for someone like myself. I’m looking at purchasing a 2014 Mac Mini so now I know that, whilst the ball-ache of doing this process myself isn’t terribly difficult (merely mundane), it does require a set of unique tools and isn’t cost-effective unless scaling the operation. Alternative, spend £20 extra for the 2.6GHz model regardless of RAM and upgrade the whole unit a year later to the 2018 model. Thanks!!!
I still have one of the 2014 i7 Minis as a daily driver, but unfortunately only 8GB Ram, which starts to become a problem these days. Also, while it has a factory SSD, that one is very slow - slower than a budget sata SSD these days. Upgrading the SSD could help, soldering more ram myself is far out of my league, and getting someone else to do it would be expensive enough to rather save up for a used 16Gig M1 mini. Still, it's awesome to see that it can be done. Great video, dosdude1 !
That really will be breathing new life into that machine. I think the i7 from that generation was a proper hyperthreaded quad core even in the 13" Macbook Pro, though it may have still been the lower powered variant. Still, it should work wonderfully with the upgraded processor and memory. Always fun to watch people keep these older machines viable with electronic wizardry. Edit: I was mistaken, the i7 u series from that generation was only a dual-core processor. How disappointing. Still, just getting a substantially faster clock speed will make a world of difference for that mac, as will the upgraded graphics. At least as far as general computing goes. Intel Iris was never a gaming powerhouse, but it's perfectly capable for general UI tasks and video playback.
I'm on a late 2014 mac mini with 4gb ram and an ssd. I think the ssd makes all the difference for me. This computer as is with the ssd is fantastic. Thanks for the information and the how to. You're super talented.
The performance improvement wasn’t as dramatic as 1.4GHz vs 3GHz would suggest because of turbo boost It’s really 2.7GHz peak vs. 3.5GHz peak. Roughly 30% more performance from 30% higher peak clockspeed 👍
@@MrKillswitch88 how do i make my 2014 mac mini handle more garageband audio tracks and plugins, i went with an external usb 3.0 samsung 870 QVO and that brought me to 400 MB/s read writes which helped, but i am looking for more tweaks?
Very interesting, but too difficult for a nebbie. You are a master technician. It have been super interesting for me to known the technologie for smd circuits reparing. Thanks.
Going to need this video now. Knowing nothing about Mac mini's I bought a 2014 Mac mini, base model. Opps, soldered on RAM :) Going to fit this into a G4 "lampshade" iMac. "
Very interesting to see this kind of '"upgrading". Follow-up question: Will 4 x 8GB memory chips work as well? Or is 16GB really the max memory for a 2014 i7 Mac Mini?
Hell Yea! Great Work Sir. New to Apple due to the M1, after finding your tutorials I traded a pile of old PC Boneyard collection for some 2011 & 2012 minis; just to learn how apple did things. Thanks for the help!
I’m impressed with your upgrades. I was told by a guy who is a certified apple tech that the memory couldn’t be upgraded. Do you do work for other people. I have a late 2014 mac mini. I’ve never done any soldering. I would be very nervous doing something like that. How much did the parts cost and where did you find them?
I mean, officially, no, it can't be upgraded. This isn't any different from installing modchips or other hardware mods to consoles. It *can* be done, but not officially.
Awesome work. A complete novice here, so please excuse my ignorance, but I didn't notice you putting any fresh solder on the RAM chips. It looked like you cleaned off all the old solder from the pins on the logic board, added flux to the new RAM chips and then put them on the logic board. Where did the fresh solder come from to solder the new chips onto the board?
Going to say that the improvement wasn't as some would have expected for a few reasons one of them being the ram as LP style ram is often a bit slower than the lower density modules that are user replaceable so with this options were well limited. Also the dual core at the end of the day is still a dual core so maybe it is possible to toss in a quad but I don't know what the thermal performance of this machine is like.
What this machine deserves! I used to have one of the base model 2014 Mac minis, it was one of my first computers, and I have to say I think it's probably one of the worst Macs Apple ever made. Especially with the 5400rpm hard drive and it is slooooow. Even on the stock operating system it's hard to bear and it got much worse with APFS (and I assume further updates after that, I got rid of mine and switched to Windows!)
Yes, it is very slow. It is a good practice to test your patience. It takes about 8 minute boot time with Big Sur. I replaced the MacOS with several Linux distros. And they run very fast. I'm glad I didn't give it to Apple to be recycled.
My experience is a bit different. I just bought this exact model for $140 USD (very cheap in Australia.. we pay more for all our technology, sadly) and first thing I did after booting into the 5400rpm HDD was put an existing 500gb Samsung Evo 850 SSD into it. Took 45mins tops, used a steel coat hanger to remove the motherboard, and it is absolutely awesome now for what I need (a second Mac for general tasks - email and web browsing). No slowness now, and I have to have quite a lot of apps open to stress it. It even runs Monterey natively (unlike my better specced mid-2014 MacBook Pro), which is apparently faster than Big Sur or whatever the most recent one was called.
First video of yours I've seen. Absolutely phenomenal job. I pulled the BIOS chip off of my 2014 Mac mini main board, dumped it, modified it, reflashed it, and resoldered it, but this is so beyond any of that. My only question is what is the motivation for this over buying something used (even the exact model you're upgrading to) or some other option? The challenge? Learning? Fun? Because I can't imagine any cost "savings" having to buy a Mac donor board + RAM chips, no less the stencil, etc. and sundry equipment I assume you already had and time required.
@@anshadedavana Absolutely it's not a for-profit endeavor. In a different comment he said "I'll either just keep them around, or give them to friends of mine who want them."
Fantastic work!! I want a 2014 mac mini with 2015 mbp internals (broadwell + iris6100 graphics). If you had a spare 2015 MBP, could you somehow manage this?
I'm going up to Canada from Portland Next year hopefully to learn Microsoldering and smartphone repair but once I get comfortable soldering I am super excited to be able to do this kind of thing. I literally just bought a Mac Mini from late 2014 for 100 so that I could use opencore to upgrade to Monterry and run BlueBubbles server off of it but I noticed the appalling 4GB of RAM and I'm like that'd be good to upgrade.
You're in for a lot of fun! Memory is doable, because of the smaller size. Just a little cheap preheater is enough. If I'd do it again I might mark the position of the IC's before removing.
So cool. I have one of these machines that I just replaced with my first ever BRAND NEW Mac, an M2 Mac mini with 16 gigs. I'd love to bump the ram in my 2014 up to 16, but I haven't touched a soldering iron in years. Do you do this for other people for a fee or know of anyone who does?
You are THE BEAST!!!! very very nice just Bought a used MAC mini 2014 to do this!! 2 Question Please 🙏 Where i can buy the ram chips and how find because i try with Elpida EDFB232A1MA-GD-F i can´t? where i can buy a new CPU and what are the especifications? Thanks u are incredible!!!!
Very interesting video! So much for the average joe doing the upgrade as in the older Mini's where memory and cpu were socketed. As a bench tech for commercial communications equipment one would have to invest in some very serious gear just to do these upgrades. Gone are the days of diy repairs and upgrades for the average individual. I do have half of the equipment needed however reballing would not be my cup of tea. Do you do this work as an occupation or hobby? Again thanks for the informative video!
Great video. I just have the same Mac mini. Off topic, how do you open this Mac mini? I want to disable the internal speaker since my internal speaker now makes a gurgle sound. Now, I just use the external speakers. I cannot disable it by changing through the setting since I already deleted my MacOS. I have replaced it with several Linux OSes.
Hey can you please write down in your video description which hardware are you using? I would like to know which preheater, which reball station, which soldering iron and which hot air gun are you using. I want to upgrade my equipment and I need some inspiration or tips. :-D I've asked you a while before in comments in other video but I've never got respond.
@dosdude1 amazing work man! I have a 2014 mini and thought I’d be able to follow along lol… yea I hate admitting defeat but think this is beyond my capabilities 😑.. Your work is impressive though!
How you align those chips to be perfectly placed on the board is beyond me. You would think that some kind of guide would be glued onto the circuit board with the original chip so that you could be 110% sure the pads and contacts are properly placed.
@@jpht1964 my bad, you never know nowadays. But he makes it look so easy, that is what triggered me into not recognising sarcasm ;) You only need a few tools and some software..
Just a standard Aoyue hot air station (with Aoyue 4545W nozzle for large BGAs), Puhui T8280 preheater, Madell QK853 small preheater, and Ksger T12 soldering iron.
@@dosdude1 wow, with those tools, you are doing such an amazing work. Im also a board level repair and programer from Tokyo. Keep going with your great works genius 💫 Im pretty sure, you will be a legend of the computer industry. Amd gmug gpu fix, os patchers are still helpful to save millions of peoples money. if you can manage a little time, im really happy to sponsor a visit japan and show my workshops. Please send me your email if you interested. Anyway Thank you. Good luck 🤞🏼
@@dosdude1 if you don’t mind please send me your contact email. I wish someday i can see and talk with dosdude1 and Luis rosmman. Because you both guys have done such a great job for this industry.
Unbelievable cool video. Thank you for all you've done for the community of old Mac users, your patches have helped me keep so many of my machines useful!
Wow, just wonderful I've never seen anyone do this before, this man is very talented
In 1986 I cut out the 64k of memory from my first Mac and soldered in 128k with guidance from Dr. Dobbs Journal. Thought that was pretty cool but my oh my how times change! Brilliant work, sir, kudos to you!
No Mac shipped with 64k of memory.
@@kirishima638Maybe it was an Apple
@@kirishima638 kilobites of memory
I've watched this in absolute awe. This is a great work of art I'll never be able to perform.
Well done, mate!
Keep it up! I'll just save money for my new Mac Mini M2 by the end of the year.
There's no way I'll find someone as competent as you to do such a thing and still make it affordable.
So happy to see you gave the CPU bigger balls.
It's amazing they sold this machine up until the end of 2018. We still have some of them in our labs. and we specced them pretty well at the time, they had the 2.6ghz i5, 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. They run terribly today on Monterey, and it's officially supported! Yet we have 2012 i5 iMacs with after-market SSDs added and they run like a dream on Monterey using OCLP.
Because it's a low tdp laptop dual core vs a socketed quad core with 65w to 80w wattage.
They may possibly run a little better if you wiped and clean installed all of them with Monterey.
I am writing this from a Mac Mini 2014, 2.6ghz i5, 512GB SSD and 8GB Ram... and I am not agree with your statement "they run terribly today on Monterey". As a matter of fact, it runs smooth. I do Photoshop and Lightroom, Internet, Excel with no problem at all.
@@asphixmx mine too... its only a 4g RAM and even with HDD.. still working very well...
I have the 2012.. it has a quad core I7 and 16gb of ram.. the 2014 was a step back I didn’t know what Apple was thinking.
From a tinkerer perspective it's amazing what you did there, complete desoldering/reballing/resoldering plus programming of bios, I draw my hat and fully heartily applaud this work and dedication. From a non mac users perspective... why is there no slot for ram and a socket for cpu?
Yes I now, new ultrabooks are also guilty of soldered on cpu/ram/ssd, but up till 2013/2014 the larger notebooks still had replaceable cpu/ram and ssds. And desktops, we don't have to talk, they are fully upgradeable in most cases.
It forced you to buy the larger capacity models or ram upgrades at purchase at a significantly higher price, as you could never upgrade. I dare say it perhaps also made them more reliable being soldered ,but I’m not sure to what extent - if any. I was waiting for the 2014 to come out so I could upgrade for a much earlier model, and when it did and I saw the soldered ram and cpu, I immediately bought the just superseded quad core whose ram and storage you could upgrade - and having two more cores was a lot faster.
Yeah, good linux knowledge and non Apple hardware makes life easier. But i love my 2012 airbook which rocks Pop OS and honestly, for many years there were no comparable pc notebooks and still today build quality is impressive. So i understand the attraction of Apple devices.... And the M cpus are impressive again. Wait for mature linux support😉
Some of the older Macs had the ability to change ram and hdd but they where finicky with what ram would work it was nice though, I guess its now a bit of both upselling the higher models instead of user upgradeable plus smaller form factors making it harder to replace.
I can say regarding the CPU as to why they moved away from CPU's in both windows Laptops and MacBook's, One is that it results in an overall thinner devices and the other is from DDR3 based devices - the Signal integrity dependent (rise and fall time of high speed digital signals like DDR3 is very small order of few pico seconds - having a socket CPU adds metal socket pins adds more impedance discontinuities which in turn results in delays / corruption /slows down of these rise / fall times. with a soldered BGA CPU you minimize these impedance anomaly- this is wht they eliminated the socket cpu approach ).
@@sheldonkupa9120 what's an airbook?
Amazing project. It's incredible what we can do with older tech nowadays.
dosdude, you are one epic person. That was a lot of work for such minimal gains and something tells me that wasn't why you upgraded.
well, this is definitely an upgrade that no else is going to do
You NEVER fail to amaze me with your skills!
Holy hell! I thought I was cool upgrading my 2012 mini with 16G of RAM and 256 SSD. This is hardcore. Well done! I love my mini! Have Big Sur on it and for daily home stuff it works great. At my work office I have the latest Apple gear. EDIT: Geekbench 704 / 1726 with the i7 / 2.6Ghz / 16G / SSD / 4000 Graphics.
Why haven’t you upgraded it to Monterey yet?
@@abduujabor well you’re not supposed to get Monterey for Mac mini (late 2012) since it’s not “compatible” (which is a stupid lie apple made up) for it.
But the thing is, you actually can get it! It’s just that you have to use open core legacy patcher (which is easy to use) and you need a 16+ USB flash drive to be able to use and get Monterey.
Here is the link to the video of it happening. It’s actually works and it’s legit. Link: ua-cam.com/video/McmO7xP4wvI/v-deo.html
(Edit) I also recommend having 16 gb of ram (which is easy to change and it’s the most a Mac mini can take) to make the experience faster.
Reballing that apu is the most difficult part because of the warping you mentioned, on the 10th gen intel had to glue a metal support bracket to the corners to avoid It
Thank you for the video. Fun to watch. I ordered a preheater, flux and 4 ram IC's from Ali expres, gonna give it a go once everything has arrived.
YES! It's a win. Thank you so much
@@gjvdspamwhere i can get links?
Great job on the hardware upgrades and restoration. I'm sure the switch to an ssd will make overall everyday tasks faster and quieter and cooler operation
More great work thanks Collin. Any chance of showing us the board pre-heater that you use please? Thanks EDIT - I found the answer in one of the comments. Cheers. hot air station, Puhui T8280 preheater, Madell QK853 preheater, and Aoyue 4545W nozzle for doing the large BGAs.
That Geekbench improvement doesn't seem exciting, but doing math it is almost a 50% better performance! That's a lot!! Great work 👏👏
Unbelievable, jaw-dropping stuff, I'm absolutely blown away. I take my hat off 🎩
Dude, you are amazing...I have been following yours videos since you started making the patches for old mac...
Mate you are a wizard of computing
Have you considered marking the chip outline on the board before you remove the old cpu to help align the replacement chip?
Very impressed by dosdude1's skill and precision. This is way above my pay grade. Will say this: I've a 2012 Mac Mini, the last Mini where both RAM and drives were socketed (not soldered) and so upgrades there were plug and play. The CPU of my old Dell Latitude was not soldered either so upgrading that was also simple for this klutz. All of which is to lament that newer tech, with glued cases and soldered everything, requires dosdude1 level expertise to service.
i think the surface tension of the solder is strong enough to warp the hot chip when you take it off the board with the vacuum pump.try next time to flip it next on a paper towel with tweezers from the sides.i have removed cpus with tweezers aswell with 0.5mm metal blade tool.but overall you are a pro :D .keep up the good work
I love to see so many fans of this great man. He deserve all the compliments.
Man I think u came from another planet.. 👍👍
Great video for someone like myself. I’m looking at purchasing a 2014 Mac Mini so now I know that, whilst the ball-ache of doing this process myself isn’t terribly difficult (merely mundane), it does require a set of unique tools and isn’t cost-effective unless scaling the operation.
Alternative, spend £20 extra for the 2.6GHz model regardless of RAM and upgrade the whole unit a year later to the 2018 model.
Thanks!!!
I still have one of the 2014 i7 Minis as a daily driver, but unfortunately only 8GB Ram, which starts to become a problem these days. Also, while it has a factory SSD, that one is very slow - slower than a budget sata SSD these days. Upgrading the SSD could help, soldering more ram myself is far out of my league, and getting someone else to do it would be expensive enough to rather save up for a used 16Gig M1 mini. Still, it's awesome to see that it can be done. Great video, dosdude1 !
That really will be breathing new life into that machine. I think the i7 from that generation was a proper hyperthreaded quad core even in the 13" Macbook Pro, though it may have still been the lower powered variant. Still, it should work wonderfully with the upgraded processor and memory. Always fun to watch people keep these older machines viable with electronic wizardry.
Edit: I was mistaken, the i7 u series from that generation was only a dual-core processor. How disappointing. Still, just getting a substantially faster clock speed will make a world of difference for that mac, as will the upgraded graphics. At least as far as general computing goes. Intel Iris was never a gaming powerhouse, but it's perfectly capable for general UI tasks and video playback.
That was amazing principally the reballing step, congrats!
I'm on a late 2014 mac mini with 4gb ram and an ssd. I think the ssd makes all the difference for me. This computer as is with the ssd is fantastic. Thanks for the information and the how to. You're super talented.
how u running the ssd? externally booted? make sure you use the usb 3.0 ports not the 2.0 ports, 3.0 is 10x faster.
Collin, what is the progress of you installing 32gb of ram on the 2015 15” mbp? And upgrading the vram to 4gb?
Love your work mate! Total boss effort!
us Aussies love DosDude hey Trev :)
Amazing how it’s done. Very skillful. Quite interesting.
Wow, your video is very good! What you did is a work of art! Very nice!
Wonderful. You are not an ordinary person, you are special.
The performance improvement wasn’t as dramatic as 1.4GHz vs 3GHz would suggest because of turbo boost
It’s really 2.7GHz peak vs. 3.5GHz peak. Roughly 30% more performance from 30% higher peak clockspeed 👍
Never dismiss what a little bit of cache will do for performance which will add a few percent ontop of any had from clocks alone.
@@MrKillswitch88 how do i make my 2014 mac mini handle more garageband audio tracks and plugins, i went with an external usb 3.0 samsung 870 QVO and that brought me to 400 MB/s read writes which helped, but i am looking for more tweaks?
Reverse Engineering!! --- It's an ART and Science that doesn't get enough appreciation. - This guy is a gem!
Looked forward to this one particularly.
Bro I love these kind of content
Im waiting for this, thank genius dude 👏 🥇
Very interesting, but too difficult for a nebbie. You are a master technician. It have been super interesting for me to known the technologie for smd circuits reparing. Thanks.
Going to need this video now. Knowing nothing about Mac mini's I bought a 2014 Mac mini, base model. Opps, soldered on RAM :) Going to fit this into a G4 "lampshade" iMac. "
Very interesting to see this kind of '"upgrading". Follow-up question: Will 4 x 8GB memory chips work as well? Or is 16GB really the max memory for a 2014 i7 Mac Mini?
Hi will you be able to produce a patch for Macs that now will go out of system upgrades like the fabulous Mac book Air 2017 ?
Hell Yea! Great Work Sir. New to Apple due to the M1, after finding your tutorials I traded a pile of old PC Boneyard collection for some 2011 & 2012 minis; just to learn how apple did things. Thanks for the help!
you are my hero, great and patient work...
Impressive work and excellent explanation.
His skills and tools we be valuable when the SHTF.
Oh what a cooooool superrrrrr video and skillllssss!!!!
I DO LOVE IT!!!
fantastic video very detailed information - thanks Dosdude :-)
Wonderful experience! Thank you.
legend just to align those memory contacts. and those cpu solder balls!
Amazing job. Is a dream your job. Congrats from Brazil
I’m impressed with your upgrades. I was told by a guy who is a certified apple tech that the memory couldn’t be upgraded. Do you do work for other people. I have a late 2014 mac mini. I’ve never done any soldering. I would be very nervous doing something like that. How much did the parts cost and where did you find them?
I mean, officially, no, it can't be upgraded. This isn't any different from installing modchips or other hardware mods to consoles. It *can* be done, but not officially.
You are watching a master at work 🫡
Awesome work.
A complete novice here, so please excuse my ignorance, but I didn't notice you putting any fresh solder on the RAM chips. It looked like you cleaned off all the old solder from the pins on the logic board, added flux to the new RAM chips and then put them on the logic board. Where did the fresh solder come from to solder the new chips onto the board?
oh god! oh my god!!! this video is going so technical OMFG!
You are godlike!
I wonder if it's possible to make the same trick with Intel Mac Mini 2018, but instead replace cpu to Xeon and add ECC memory?
Is the Mac Mini a single channel ram system? If so, it might explain the underwhelming improvement.
No, it's dual-channel. After looking into it, the score it got was about the same as other systems with this same CPU. So it's working correctly.
Going to say that the improvement wasn't as some would have expected for a few reasons one of them being the ram as LP style ram is often a bit slower than the lower density modules that are user replaceable so with this options were well limited. Also the dual core at the end of the day is still a dual core so maybe it is possible to toss in a quad but I don't know what the thermal performance of this machine is like.
You are a fckn genius. I see The Force is strong with you.
Amazing as always. Apple probably needs to hire you to do prototype manufacturing/testing and repair.
Very nice. I wonder if some thermal throttling is taking place here to account for the performance boost being rather modest.
I wonder too what the bottleneck is. Slow ram? Thermal throttling? CL timing? What if you to under volt the cpu?
The benchmark results are actually on par with other systems with this CPU (in fact are even slightly higher), so it is running as it should.
@@dosdude1 Fascinating. Thanks.
당신은 천재입니다. 진정한 능력자... 멋집니다.
How Much Can You Charge Me For My Macmini Late 2014 Onboard Ram Upgrade I'm In South Africa
wow i think this is your work.. GREAT!!!
Nice Target Display Mode IMac’s. I use two 24-inch Apple Cinema Display with my 2014 Mac mini i7 at home. And yes I know about OCLP 😊
What this machine deserves! I used to have one of the base model 2014 Mac minis, it was one of my first computers, and I have to say I think it's probably one of the worst Macs Apple ever made. Especially with the 5400rpm hard drive and it is slooooow. Even on the stock operating system it's hard to bear and it got much worse with APFS (and I assume further updates after that, I got rid of mine and switched to Windows!)
Why did you not install windows on it and put a ssd.
CPU and RAM may be limited in these models, but just upgrading to an SSD would make a maaaaaaasssive difference.
Yes, it is very slow. It is a good practice to test your patience. It takes about 8 minute boot time with Big Sur.
I replaced the MacOS with several Linux distros. And they run very fast. I'm glad I didn't give it to Apple to be recycled.
My experience is a bit different. I just bought this exact model for $140 USD (very cheap in Australia.. we pay more for all our technology, sadly) and first thing I did after booting into the 5400rpm HDD was put an existing 500gb Samsung Evo 850 SSD into it. Took 45mins tops, used a steel coat hanger to remove the motherboard, and it is absolutely awesome now for what I need (a second Mac for general tasks - email and web browsing). No slowness now, and I have to have quite a lot of apps open to stress it. It even runs Monterey natively (unlike my better specced mid-2014 MacBook Pro), which is apparently faster than Big Sur or whatever the most recent one was called.
@@heavypizzas6004 Can you add an portable SSD by using USB cable and boot from it? By the way, how do you open the Mac mini casing?
AMAZING WORK, CONGRATS!
First video of yours I've seen. Absolutely phenomenal job. I pulled the BIOS chip off of my 2014 Mac mini main board, dumped it, modified it, reflashed it, and resoldered it, but this is so beyond any of that. My only question is what is the motivation for this over buying something used (even the exact model you're upgrading to) or some other option? The challenge? Learning? Fun? Because I can't imagine any cost "savings" having to buy a Mac donor board + RAM chips, no less the stencil, etc. and sundry equipment I assume you already had and time required.
@@anshadedavana Absolutely it's not a for-profit endeavor. In a different comment he said "I'll either just keep them around, or give them to friends of mine who want them."
🎉you really up on spec these machines
Fantastic work!! I want a 2014 mac mini with 2015 mbp internals (broadwell + iris6100 graphics). If you had a spare 2015 MBP, could you somehow manage this?
yah... about that you have 4 sets of 2 resistors for the spd data low & high and they are using 10k & 100k resistors depending what you chose
I know, but it doesn't really matter. Works just fine to pull up with 100K, pull down with 10K, and vice versa.
Looks nice and professional, except the part with cleaning the CPU over a DVD player
Not something I could do but great work.
I'm going up to Canada from Portland Next year hopefully to learn Microsoldering and smartphone repair but once I get comfortable soldering I am super excited to be able to do this kind of thing. I literally just bought a Mac Mini from late 2014 for 100 so that I could use opencore to upgrade to Monterry and run BlueBubbles server off of it but I noticed the appalling 4GB of RAM and I'm like that'd be good to upgrade.
You're in for a lot of fun! Memory is doable, because of the smaller size. Just a little cheap preheater is enough. If I'd do it again I might mark the position of the IC's before removing.
Any repair shops that might do this for consumers?
So cool. I have one of these machines that I just replaced with my first ever BRAND NEW Mac, an M2 Mac mini with 16 gigs. I'd love to bump the ram in my 2014 up to 16, but I haven't touched a soldering iron in years. Do you do this for other people for a fee or know of anyone who does?
muahahahah i love this!!! make the impossible .....POSSIBLE!!!! Keep up the great work!!💪💪
great stuff, cheers for sharing it.
Great job was done! Awesome.
You have some amazing skill level.
Very nice video, kudos for the upgrade, just a question, where do you buy the new ram chips? what are the specs for them?
They're Elpida EDFB232A1MA-GD-F chips, which are 4GB (32Gbit) LPDDR3 chips rated for 1600 MHz. You can get them from AliExpress.
@@dosdude1 you are the best!!!
Amazing job as always !
You are THE BEAST!!!! very very nice just Bought a used MAC mini 2014 to do this!!
2 Question Please 🙏
Where i can buy the ram chips and how find because i try with Elpida EDFB232A1MA-GD-F i can´t?
where i can buy a new CPU and what are the especifications?
Thanks u are incredible!!!!
Very interesting video! So much for the average joe doing the upgrade as in the older Mini's where memory and cpu were socketed. As a bench tech for commercial communications equipment one would have to invest in some very serious gear just to do these upgrades. Gone are the days of diy repairs and upgrades for the average individual. I do have half of the equipment needed however reballing would not be my cup of tea. Do you do this work as an occupation or hobby?
Again thanks for the informative video!
what an amazing guy how clever he is i watch his other videos too he cool 😎
Great video. I just have the same Mac mini.
Off topic, how do you open this Mac mini? I want to disable the internal speaker since my internal speaker now makes a gurgle sound. Now, I just use the external speakers. I cannot disable it by changing through the setting since I already deleted my MacOS. I have replaced it with several Linux OSes.
Hey can you please write down in your video description which hardware are you using? I would like to know which preheater, which reball station, which soldering iron and which hot air gun are you using. I want to upgrade my equipment and I need some inspiration or tips. :-D
I've asked you a while before in comments in other video but I've never got respond.
Dude you should do custom orders. I'd love to see my Mac mini 2014 upgraded like that!
That's a good use of an old DVD/CD ROM drive.
something therapeutic about soldering bga's
I'd be interested in knowing what it costs to get something like this done. It's one of those crazy things I love.
Necesito esa Mac mini
@dosdude1 amazing work man! I have a 2014 mini and thought I’d be able to follow along lol… yea I hate admitting defeat but think this is beyond my capabilities 😑.. Your work is impressive though!
How you align those chips to be perfectly placed on the board is beyond me. You would think that some kind of guide would be glued onto the circuit board with the original chip so that you could be 110% sure the pads and contacts are properly placed.
Hi there great information! Where did you buy the ram chips? TIA
I got them from AliExpress, look for "EDFB232A1MA-JD-F".
@@dosdude1 thanks.
Incredible that such an easy upgrade is possible on a Mac…
Well 'easy' - he is probably the only one in the world who is doing it, has the tools, but more important - has the knowledge.
@@SuperRogier i was cynical…
@@jpht1964 my bad, you never know nowadays. But he makes it look so easy, that is what triggered me into not recognising sarcasm ;) You only need a few tools and some software..
Wow amazing job dude
Please tell us, what are the tools your are using for these upgrades. Please it help
A lot
Just a standard Aoyue hot air station (with Aoyue 4545W nozzle for large BGAs), Puhui T8280 preheater, Madell QK853 small preheater, and Ksger T12 soldering iron.
@@dosdude1 wow, with those tools, you are doing such an amazing work.
Im also a board level repair and programer from Tokyo.
Keep going with your great works genius 💫
Im pretty sure, you will be a legend of the computer industry. Amd gmug gpu fix, os patchers are still helpful to save millions of peoples money.
if you can manage a little time, im really happy to sponsor a visit japan and show my workshops. Please send me your email if you interested.
Anyway Thank you. Good luck 🤞🏼
@@dosdude1 if you don’t mind please send me your contact email. I wish someday i can see and talk with dosdude1 and Luis rosmman. Because you both guys have done such a great job for this industry.
I would like to see you fit or modify the part or parts required to get apple OS to boot natively on any laptop or desktop pc.