Well, after dusting off my old Efika about a month ago and realising that in order to use MorphOS on the internet I was going to need more power and particularly more memory, I finally managed to get a MacMini 1.5Ghz last week off a nice chap on eBay.

Turns out he had two, which he had bought to try MorphOS on back when the latest release was 3.7 but he never really got around to installing it properly.

I got 3.13 installed fairly painlessly and I'm really enjoying using an Amiga like system over 20 years since my A1200/030 stopped being my daily machine of choice.

Couple of questions though, where this forum's expert advice would be appreciated;

1. How do other MacMini users find the fan speed on their machines?

Mine is definitely linked to the GPU, as it seems to take off when I am running anything graphically intensive, such as YouTube or a game. The machine itself doesn't seem to get too hot. The base gets hot but not to any extreme level and if I close down whatever I am doing the fan speed goes down, so at least I know it is responding to what I am doing. My real concern is that this is 15 year old hardware and I don't want to push it more than it can handle, although equally I do want to be able to use it to its full potential.

2. Does anybody have a good recommendation for a wireless mouse and keyboard?

At the moment I'm using the USB keyboard I bought 12 years ago for my Efika and a cheap wired Microsoft mouse, but I would like something wireless to tidy up my desk. I've tried my Microsoft 4000 wireless mouse and that doesn't seem to work. I'm aware I could get a wireless Apple mouse and keyboard but at the moment I only have MorphOS on the machine and I don't have the install disks for Leopard and really don't need a MacOS on the machine as it doesn't interest me (other than perhaps turning the start up chime off) so pairing these is going to be an issue.

Overall, I'm just so impressed with the whole system right now. I finally have an "Amiga" where I can do my normal day to day things but on an operating system that is light and efficient and that I can easily understand. It's been 20 years but I'm so glad to be back.

> Mine is definitely linked to the GPU, as it seems to take off when
> I am running anything graphically intensive, such as YouTube [...]

On MorphOS, watching videos (on YouTube or wherever) doesn't tax the GPU as much as it taxes the CPU.

> Does anybody have a good recommendation for a wireless mouse and keyboard?

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6945&forum=11&start=16

> turning the start up chime off

Prefs/Sound can do this since MorphOS 3.12.

Good to hear you enjoy your MorphOS experience!

1. Watching videos is CPU intensive work, because we don't have software/drivers for hardware decoding of videos. Only hardware assistance is the overlay option, which can scale videos with no extra cost, but decoding itself is done by the CPU still. By default YouTube doesn't use the overlay playback and maxes out the CPU load, but there's a script for OWB that makes those videos run in a "full window" overlay mode. With the script CPU load of YouTube playback drops from 100% to somewhere around 30-50% on a Mac mini 1.5GHz, and that makes the fan speed much slower too.

By the recent changes in YouTube, we now have to spoof OWB as iPad if we want to browse the actual UI on YouTube, and that also needs an updated "Fullscreen Fix" script. More info here: https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=9&topic_id=12903&post_id=146399&viewmode=flat&sortorder=0&showonepost=1

And games are CPU intensive too. You can enable the CPU Monitor screenbar module to see when the CPU is under heavy load. In normal use the fan speed stays quite moderate, even when browsing, because CPU load isn't constant then. But for games, non-overlayed mid-resolution videos, or HD videos it will stay at max and makes the fan noisy too.

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Thanks for that. I was thinking I was going to be stuck with that forever.

Okay so it seems that it is probably the CPU which is getting hot as I do more intensive tasks, although it is definitely graphics related as when I open a webpage on OWB with lots of pictures (24 bit) the fan will start to spin up then and as quite soon after the webpage is closed it will slow down again.

Just worried that my machine might be struggling a bit for cooling due to its age.

Well, it might be a good idea to change thermal paste on CPU and GPU (and clean the fan by the way) if you haven't done that already.

Welcome back to the next gen "Amiga" compatible! You chose wisely IMO. I prefer a G5 myself, but i understand they are not for everyone due to size and other issues.

If you haven't take it apart carefully. Don't be wedging a flathead screwdriver and gouge the case up in order to get it opened lol. My Mac Mini at the time had a fair amount of dust on the CPU and the fan itself, so its best now to go in and clean things up. This would help with cooling.

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I still don't think it's about graphics itself... pictures itself don't make such a load or at least it falls back to the CPU anyway if you try to view a page with pics in huge resolution that must be scaled down or so. Or the common problem nowadays is that gallery pages use some heavily bloated javascripts to render the page... it's just several layers of javascript crap running on CPU before it gets pictures displayed... just to get some "nice" fades or other nonsense there.

+1 for dusting off fans & changing thermal paste. That and re-calibrating fans (with Apple ASD service disc) made my G5 7,3 cooler and much less noisy.

Just tried running youtube again now and noticed that the CPU usage went up to 100% fairly quickly, so now I understand the rendering is being done by the CPU that makes sense.

Sat here now on Morph.Zone its practically idle.

I didn't really want to have to open it up, as I'm not the most technical to be honest. I presume there is a heatsink on top of the CPU, how is that fixed down? I know the thermal paste needs to go between the two but how do you get the heatsink off first?

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Thanks for this, its made a massive difference. Just watching youtube now and the CPU usage drops to under 50% and that really helps with the fan speed.

I had got the original script installed and had noticed that I was having to spoof as iPad to get youtube to work but didn't know about the new script and the fact the old script wasn't doing anything.

My fan speed noise has drastically reduced after raising my mini off the desk a little to allow for air flow underneath it (if you touch the underneath of the mini after a while of fan spinning, you should notice just how hot it is).
It definitely makes a big difference for myself raising it a little. It doesn't solve the noise fully, however it's significantly quieter.