Originally posted by: DEredita
I dunno why, but I have a soft spot for the Mini. Now I wish they came with the Core 2 Duo processors. Rumor is February a new Mac Mini will be released. Someone recently put a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo in his, then realized though benchmarks the hard drive was bottlenecking, so he added a 7200 desktop drive using a firewire enclosure as his primary drive. The benchmarks were huge improvement.
Ditto, something about the Mini is just so cool

And yeah, if you can build a computer you can swap the proc in the Mini pretty easily. I put a 2ghz Core Duo in mine early last summer, worked out great. There are four main upgrades you can do inside the Mini: the proc, the ram, the hard drive, and the DVD drive. Mine has a 2ghz Core Duo, 2 gigs of G.Skill ram, a 100gb 7200rpm Seagate 2.5" SATA hard drive, and a Pioneer DVR-K06 8x DVD burner. I'd love to get my hands on one of those 2.33ghz Meroms, but they cost more than the Mini itself right now :Q
The Firewire option works just as good as replacing the stock drive in the Mini, since you can use a Firewire drive as your boot medium. My friend and I did a bunch of work on the Mini over the summer and came out with adapters for the SATA 2.5" hard drive and the IDE slimline drive, so you can use full-sized SATA and PATA drives with the Mini

The SATA connector isn't too hard to come by, but the PATA was a real pain in the neck. However, you can use up to two drives on the IDE channel (like a hard drive and a DVD drive), so it worked out nicely. Plus an SATA drive (anyone want to do a Raptor-based Mini?) If you want to build yourself a cheap power Mac, it's a good way to go - grab a nice case, the appropriate adapters, some full-sized drives, and faster proc and more ram and voila, sub-$2000 Mac Pro
