EQMac.com

My guildmates are probably pretty tired of hearing about my computer troubles. Thought I'd throw this out for any insights anybody might have.

I bought this Mac Mini online, from Apple, in April of this year. It is as follows:
OSX 10.6.8
2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
NVidia Geforce 320 M
I am running it with a VGA monitor at 1024 x 768, 85 HZ, 32 bit color.

Not long after I got it the hack on Sony happened and they shut down the servers for a while. To get my EQ fix, I used bootcamp and installed Windows in order to play Project 99. Then, they brought Al Kabor back online with all the PC servers. The mini began to freeze up periodically. When this happens, the keyboard and mouse don't work and I'm unable to quit Everquest and shut down properly. I have to just turn the power off and then back on again. It takes some time to release the character I am on from the game (I've died a number of times when this happens, other times it just locks up when I'm standing around chatting.)

I associated it, rightly or wrongly, with having the Windows partition. It never happened while in the Windows, only when running Everquest mac. I finally removed the windows partition and bootcamp, reinstalled OSX and things were peachy keen for a while. For June - October in fact. Then, it began happening again. With the old client and also with the new Intel client. I've tried changing keyboards and mice. I finally broke down and took it to the Apple Genius at a nearby mall.

They kept it for 2 days and ran stress tests on the memory and video. Of course, no trouble showed up. They were not trusting of the 3rd party video adaptor I had so I bought an official Apple one.

The lockups kept happening. I took it back to the Genius bar. The fellow had me log into Everquest using their store wireless. He had me use windowed mode so he could tab out and run some analysis of memory usage. He showed me how much of my memory was being used and explained when it needs more, it goes to the hard drive (virtual memory) after a while. He also recommended more memory - at that point it still had the 2GB it came with but I had purchased 8GB from Crucial but not installed it yet. The guy at the Apple store installed it for me.

It's STILL happening. 2 or 3 times since I had the new memory put in. It seems to be happening after a lengthy playing session. Like at about the 9 or 10 hour mark. Other times (before the new memory) it happened within the first 5 minutes after I had logged in once, but usually it's after a while.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS COMPUTER? All I use it for is Everquest, and a minor amount of web surfing and email.

_________________
Rysia Belladonna 65 Wood Elf Rogue
Daria Vervain 65 Wood Elf Druid
Carolee Nightshade 65 Gnome Necromancer
Eraiya Meadowsweet 65 High Elf Enchanter
Kylie Santolina 65 Gnome Magician
Therma Nuclear 65 Dark Elf Wizard
Lillie Hawthorn 65 Human Monk
Karia Melilot 65 Halfling Druid
Lisbeth Artemisias 65 Iksar Shaman
Portia Carrera 65 Half Elf Bard

<Temerity>

I'll add that I never had this happen with my ancient G4 Powerbook that had 512 MB of ram. It ran REALLY slow, but didn't lock up. Nor with my G5 tower, which died of a water cooled processor failure in January 2011. Nor does it happen with my IMac, bought in August of 2010 and which I currently run spaces and up to 3 instances of EQ at a time, with 4GB of ram.

_________________
Rysia Belladonna 65 Wood Elf Rogue
Daria Vervain 65 Wood Elf Druid
Carolee Nightshade 65 Gnome Necromancer
Eraiya Meadowsweet 65 High Elf Enchanter
Kylie Santolina 65 Gnome Magician
Therma Nuclear 65 Dark Elf Wizard
Lillie Hawthorn 65 Human Monk
Karia Melilot 65 Halfling Druid
Lisbeth Artemisias 65 Iksar Shaman
Portia Carrera 65 Half Elf Bard

<Temerity>

I'm betting it's overheating or a faulty processor. My iMac does the same thing from time to time. I actually had to replace the CPU in an old G3 for the same reason.

If it is overheating I'm not sure there is much you can do about it except try and make sure there is good airflow around and near it.

_________________
Duchess Lana Mercyhand
Lord Protector of Destiny
Grandmaster Baker/Brewer
Tanks for the memories
~moejoe chamois, 65 shaman~|~cambria silverfir, 65 druid~|~magella summner, 55 mage~

My mini used to get hot too I'd get a smu fancontrol just in case and crank those fans up since apple prefers silent machines that run hot to cool slightly more noisy ones.

_________________

Agreed. Apple designed the cooling on their Minis and MacBooks for normal applications like web browsing, word processing, and so on. Those apps aren't very resource intensive. EQ, on the other hand, uses a lot more processor and graphics resources than that stuff, which means a lot more exhaust heat inside that compact chassis.

smcFanControl is freeware, available here. It lets you manually ramp up your fan speeds, and get rid of that waste heat faster. The program also lets you view the internal temperature of your computer on the status bar, so it should help you figure out if the lock-ups you're experiencing really are heat related. If you ramp up the fans and keep things nice and cool, yet still find your computer locking up, there are some other things you could try. But fan speeds are the obvious place to start, imo.

_________________
Pithy Deathwish, manic mechanic of <Temerity>

Refuse, rubbish, filth, slime, muck and other alt-putrescence:
[ Drat | Dart | Zounds | Slouch | Pouch ]

Thanks for the fan speed suggestions. This machine does run pretty hot to the touch after a while. Yesterday before our raid though, I left the game and just did some web surfing for about 2 hours before hand. Once into the game, I locked up within 45 minutes.

I'll give this fan thing a try. Hopefully I won't explode the fans!

_________________
Rysia Belladonna 65 Wood Elf Rogue
Daria Vervain 65 Wood Elf Druid
Carolee Nightshade 65 Gnome Necromancer
Eraiya Meadowsweet 65 High Elf Enchanter
Kylie Santolina 65 Gnome Magician
Therma Nuclear 65 Dark Elf Wizard
Lillie Hawthorn 65 Human Monk
Karia Melilot 65 Halfling Druid
Lisbeth Artemisias 65 Iksar Shaman
Portia Carrera 65 Half Elf Bard

<Temerity>

I just installed the fancontrol and it's running about 95 degrees F and 1795 RPM and I'm only just web surfing. What kind of temperatures and RPMs should I be shooting for? I guess I'll have to mci out to the finder to check. I have it showing in the menu bar but it isn't there with the browser active, I have to minimize Safari and click Finder to see the readout.

_________________
Rysia Belladonna 65 Wood Elf Rogue
Daria Vervain 65 Wood Elf Druid
Carolee Nightshade 65 Gnome Necromancer
Eraiya Meadowsweet 65 High Elf Enchanter
Kylie Santolina 65 Gnome Magician
Therma Nuclear 65 Dark Elf Wizard
Lillie Hawthorn 65 Human Monk
Karia Melilot 65 Halfling Druid
Lisbeth Artemisias 65 Iksar Shaman
Portia Carrera 65 Half Elf Bard

<Temerity>

Well, before you start tweaking fan speeds I'd suggest you just play EQ for a while at the default speed (that's the 1800 RPM you're at now) and make a few notes about how hot your Mac gets. That'll be handy info for establishing a baseline.

As for a temperature range to shoot for? According to the internets, most Intel processors have a "catastrophic shutdown mechanism" that apparently kicks in around 90 C (195 F), so you'll want to stay well below that. 150 F is probably a good target to stay under most of the time. If you get up into the 160's or 170's on a raid or if you're boxing for a minute, it's not a huge deal, but I wouldn't be comfy maintaining those kind of temperatures for too long.

I don't know what fan speeds you'll need in order to maintain that. That will depend on a lot of factors: the airflow over your Mini, what kind of surface it's on, the temperature in the room, what you're doing in EQ (models, spell effects, zone graphics, boxing), and so on. I don't have a Mini and I'm kind of out of touch with EQ, especially the new client, so I think you'll probably just have to play with it and see what happens. I'd suggest making a few profiles in smcFanControl with different speeds. You can do that by going to Preferences and clicking the + sign next to the first drop-down menu, then moving the slider to whatever speed you want that profile to use. I'd say make profiles for 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 and 6,000 RPM, then you can fiddle with speeds as you play just by clicking on the smc menu and changing the "Active Setting:" field.

Hope this works out for ya, Rys.

_________________
Pithy Deathwish, manic mechanic of <Temerity>

Refuse, rubbish, filth, slime, muck and other alt-putrescence:
[ Drat | Dart | Zounds | Slouch | Pouch ]

I'm just running around alone in PoTranq and I took a little swim a ways into PoWater and it's up to 167 degrees already. No spells being cast anywhere near me...doesn't sound good. The case of it isn't anywhere NEAR as hot as it generally gets after playing for a long time, which I do. And the fan's up to 1900.

_________________
Rysia Belladonna 65 Wood Elf Rogue
Daria Vervain 65 Wood Elf Druid
Carolee Nightshade 65 Gnome Necromancer
Eraiya Meadowsweet 65 High Elf Enchanter
Kylie Santolina 65 Gnome Magician
Therma Nuclear 65 Dark Elf Wizard
Lillie Hawthorn 65 Human Monk
Karia Melilot 65 Halfling Druid
Lisbeth Artemisias 65 Iksar Shaman
Portia Carrera 65 Half Elf Bard

<Temerity>

Only 1900 RPM?! My Macbook pro hits 5-6k easy when running EQ.

_________________

I have zero experience knowing what is good or bad in this area. I'm just having bad flashbacks to the horrible noises my G5 was making prior to its demise - 3 weeks after the replace/repair program for the faulty water cooled processors ended. Sure, I can crank that fan up. But is it gonna just fail and melt something down? I couldn't even hear it until I set it at 4000 RPM and I was too scared to let it do that for any length of time.

What I want is my money back on this thing. Put it toward a better Mac. I was not in a good position money wise when I picked out this mini. I think it's a lemon.

_________________
Rysia Belladonna 65 Wood Elf Rogue
Daria Vervain 65 Wood Elf Druid
Carolee Nightshade 65 Gnome Necromancer
Eraiya Meadowsweet 65 High Elf Enchanter
Kylie Santolina 65 Gnome Magician
Therma Nuclear 65 Dark Elf Wizard
Lillie Hawthorn 65 Human Monk
Karia Melilot 65 Halfling Druid
Lisbeth Artemisias 65 Iksar Shaman
Portia Carrera 65 Half Elf Bard

<Temerity>

I don't think it's a lemon, Rys, the cooling system just wasn't designed for gaming. That's why we need to help it out a bit. Go ahead and ramp up those fans. It's okay if you can hear 'em. Apple likes to keep fan speeds low because, all things being equal, quieter computers are more fun to use. All things are not equal here, though. You're getting catastrophic shut-downs because your Mini is running hot hot hot. That is far worse for your computer than a little wear and tear on the $60 fan. Running at 4, 5, or 6,000 RPM is just fine. The processor's working hard in there. Give it some air.

_________________
Pithy Deathwish, manic mechanic of <Temerity>

Refuse, rubbish, filth, slime, muck and other alt-putrescence:
[ Drat | Dart | Zounds | Slouch | Pouch ]

I remember running mine at 3-4k when two boxing and it kept things in an acceptable temp range.

_________________

I cranked it up to 3000 rpm and it was around 88 degrees and another time 124 degrees on two of the 4 lockups at our raid yesterday.

Today I took it back to Genius at local store and got the incredibly helpful answer that maybe Everquest just isn't compatible with a Mac Mini. It sure isn't with MY mac mini. I don't think heat is really the problem. But something sure is....

_________________
Rysia Belladonna 65 Wood Elf Rogue
Daria Vervain 65 Wood Elf Druid
Carolee Nightshade 65 Gnome Necromancer
Eraiya Meadowsweet 65 High Elf Enchanter
Kylie Santolina 65 Gnome Magician
Therma Nuclear 65 Dark Elf Wizard
Lillie Hawthorn 65 Human Monk
Karia Melilot 65 Halfling Druid
Lisbeth Artemisias 65 Iksar Shaman
Portia Carrera 65 Half Elf Bard

<Temerity>

It won't make you any happier to know that my Mac Mini has never locked up while playing Everquest. I'm sorry Rysia

Apple should replace it.

_________________
Duchess Lana Mercyhand
Lord Protector of Destiny
Grandmaster Baker/Brewer
Tanks for the memories
~moejoe chamois, 65 shaman~|~cambria silverfir, 65 druid~|~magella summner, 55 mage~