Just what it says!
I have a PowerPC Mac Mini, 1.5ghz G4, with a 64MB Radeon 9200. I’d like to upgrade the card to something a little more capable, preferably which supports Core Image and a few more FPS for something like Unreal Tournament.
Any information on such a process would be appreciated.
Disclaimer: I am a PC user, so take this with a giant grain of salt.
Now I need to earn back some credibility. I am a PC hardware nut. I love finding old parts and glomming them together, and I’ve been doing it for over a decade – pretty much since the parts inside PCs became interchangeable. I’ve built my last four computers from parts, and tomorrow I’m building one for a friend. So I know my way around the inside of a computer case.
I don’t know how many models of Mac Mini there are, or whether “1.5GHz G4” is even enough information to constrain the problem, but every Mac Mini I saw the guts of online had a built-in graphics processor. The Radeon 9200 was adapted into a built-in part for laptops called the Mobility 9200, and I’m betting that’s what you’ve got. For there to be any possibility of an upgrade, your machine would need to include one of the following slots: AGP, PCI, or PCIe. There are no such slots inside the Mac Minis I saw, so unless you recognize one of the above images, you’re sunk. There is room to upgrade the RAM in most Minis, but no way to order the GPU to use more of it, so I can’t even offer you bread-crumbs of solace with the promise of squeezing a wee bit more performance out.
Essentially, there’s nowhere to connect the upgrade to the rest of the machine. You could use a soldering iron to make such a slot, but by the time you finished changing it to include the possibility of a graphics upgrade, it would no longer be a Mac Mini - the case would not fit back on, the power supply would be new or modified, and the graphics port would not neatly align with the back of the case. While hypothetically such a thing would be possible, I want to leave no doubt in your mind that you’re not going to make it happen without serious time and money spent, and you are very likely to end up with ruined hardware if you try.