With a little work you can turn your Mac mini into a powerful Windows gaming system. So why not?

Originally slow from factory. However, I manage to buy special tools for the Mac Mini at Amazon, and I was able to install a Samsung 250gb SDD. I also played around with the memory chips, by 1st installing an 8gb memory chip on the top slot, and it gave me 9gb total. Technical specifications for the Mac mini 'Core i5' 2.6 (Late 2014). Dates sold, processor type, memory info, hard drive details, price and more.

I just heard something: A tectonic eruption of eye-rolling from PC gamers. Look, if you've got a custom rig with Nvidia Titan hardware and 4K displays to run Crysis 3 in ridiculous mode, move along. There's nothing for you here. If, on the other hand, you already have a Mac mini, or if you've been thinking about getting one but think it's underpowered for gaming, what I have to say may surprise you.

One of my kids wanted to play Windows games that weren't available on the Mac. He can certainly play plenty of games that are out for the Mac, but most stuff still isn't out for the Mac. That's not going to change. Apple accepts that, otherwise they wouldn't provide you with the Boot Camp Assistant utility to begin with.

Our victim is a 2010-era Mac mini. That's the last Mac mini model to sport a built-in SuperDrive. It has Nvidia GeForce 320M integrated graphics. Not as fast as the average gamer GPU card in a custom-built PC, granted. But enough to run a lot of games at acceptable frame rates.

It may surprise you, but the Mac mini is an adept little Windows gaming system. Its graphics speed can't compare to a dedicated gaming rig, but it doesn't have to. Because while it spends some of its time running Windows, it's also a great general purpose Mac running the latest version of Mavericks.

Better at Windows games than Mac games

Whatever Mac mini you use will probably run Windows games faster than it is does Mac games. Windows graphics tend to run faster than OS X graphics do on the same hardware, thanks to more extensive Windows driver optimization and underlying differences in the way the OSes are structured.

It took a few afternoons to get everything squared away. This Mac's been well used since it was new, and its drive partition didn't pass muster with Boot Camp Assistant. Once Drive Utility patched things up I was able to get started.

I used Windows 7, which has broad game support and is available in Home Premium trim for $99 or less from online retailers.

The alternatives

Running Mac games natively and exclusively is always an option. There are a lot of good games on the Mac, games that will run well or decently on the Mac mini. They're available from the Mac App Store, Steam, MacGameStore.com and elsewhere.

If you're looking for a Windows game experience but are reluctant to have to reboot your Mac each time to do it, you can install software that bridges the Windows gap.

VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop get the lion's share of attention, partly because they broad appeal for Mac users who also want to run business software and specialty apps that won't run on OS X natively. Both continue to optimize their releases for the broadest and fastest driver support they can.

CodeWeavers' CrossOver is worth a special look from gamers. It's optimized for games, and unlike the other two or Boot Camp, doesn't require you to have a Windows license.

Putting the pedal to the medal

How well does it actually run, you ask?

A lot of it depends on the individual performance requirements of the game. Obviously some games employ enormously sophisticated 3D engines that want more horsepower than the Mac mini can muster. Many don't, and the relatively modest integrated graphics in the mini are perfectly sufficient to play them.

If you keep your expectations realistic, you can usually tweak settings and resolutions enough to get a really playable experience. For many games, that's frame rates of 20 to 30 frames per second; for others, it's even higher, with higher levels of detail possible.

I've played a combination of FPS, strategy and RPG games on our little Mac mini, and it's held up well. My 14 year old has been pretty happy; he's been dividing his time between various Steam games he couldn't play on the Mac and other fare; a particular favorite is Smite, a multiplayer online battle arena strategy game from Hi-Rez Studios. He also says that old favorites he could play on the Mac, like Valve's own Team Fortress 2, subjectively run better on Windows than on OS X.

The bottom line

I'm never going to ditch my Mac in favor of a Windows PC — I prefer the Mac user experience to the Windows user experience, that's all there is to it. But I can't dispute that there are a lot of fun Windows games to be played, and I'm grateful that Apple's made it easy to equip my Mac as a Windows PC.

As much as I love Sony and Microsoft's game consoles, they're just that — game consoles. The greatest thing about using a Mac for Windows gaming is that you're still using a Mac at the end of the day.

Tune back in tomorrow as I walk you through installing Boot Camp yourself. In the interim, I'm curious to see what you think: Have you set up Windows using Boot Camp Assistant? Are you tempted to?

Eve updates app to add new customization and better iCloud syncing

Eve has updated its Eve for HomeKit app, and version 4.2 has a host of new features!

It's easy to feel sorry for the Mac Mini. Apple went through all of its Macs last year, updating them with new Intel Haswell CPUs and 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapters and faster SSDs and (sometimes) Thunderbolt 2, while the Mini sat and waited for an upgrade that never came.

Free Mac Card Games

Apple quickly announced a new Mini at its media event in October, two years after the 2012 Mac Mini was introduced. Desktops and laptops haven't advanced a whole lot in the last year, so for the most part the Mini is just getting 2013's upgrades a year late. If that was all that was happening, the Mac Mini would be a welcome-if-overdue update to the desktop. The 2014 Mac Mini is more interesting than that but unfortunately for people who have been waiting for this refresh, it's more notable for the stuff it's missing than its upgrades.

We typically like to review the base models of computers when possible, but in the Mac Mini's case the upgraded $699 configuration is more interesting, and it's the one you ought to get if you care about performance (more on that later). We'll provide benchmarks representative of the $499 Mini, too, but know ahead of time that it uses the same guts as the base-model MacBook Airs and the $1,099 iMac. To evaluate the computer's SSD performance, we've also equipped our review unit with a 1TB Fusion Drive, a $200 upgrade—we won't be recapping how this feature works, but our deep dive is over here.

What hasn't changed

Visually, the Mac Mini looks the same as it has since Apple stopped shipping SuperDrive-equipped models back in 2011. It's an unadorned, flattened aluminum box with sharp edges and rounded corners. The front face is broken up by a small white power LED and an IR receiver, and the sides are perfectly smooth. A separate piece of black plastic on the back of the unit houses the fan vent and a reasonably impressive complement of ports, which has changed only a little from last year.

The FireWire 800 port has finally been jettisoned (the 2012 Mini was the last of the Macs to include the aging interface, though Thunderbolt-to-FireWire dongles still exist), and there's a second Thunderbolt 2 port in its place. Returning from last year are the gigabit Ethernet jack, HDMI port, four USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, and audio in and headphone jacks. It's still annoying that Apple insists on placing all of the ports for its desktops on the back of the computers. It's no surprise at all for longtime Mac users, but PC switchers (a group the Mini specifically targets) may need to change their behavior.

Finally, the new Mini is exactly the same size and weight as the old one. If you were hoping for some kind of reduction here, keep hoping.

What has improved

Delays to high-end Intel CPUs based on the new Broadwell architecture mean that most of the 2014 Mini's improvements came to every other Mac in the lineup in 2013, so the box's insides do little to surprise. We're looking at Intel Haswell CPUs instead of Ivy Bridge, which should reduce power consumption while improving CPU and GPU performance. 802.11ac Wi-Fi bumps the maximum theoretical link speed to 1.3Gbps, roughly three times the 450Mbps 802.11n in the 2012 model.

Thunderbolt 2 raises transfer speeds to 20Gbps, and the included DisplayPort 1.2 spec brings 30Hz 4K display support to the Mac Mini. The HDMI port can also drive 3840×2160 displays at 30Hz and 4096×2160 displays at 24Hz. This Apple document has more information on external display support, but the most important thing you should know is that the Mini does not support multi-stream transport (MST) displays, meaning that 4K output at 60Hz is impossible. The forthcoming DisplayPort 1.3 standard is necessary to drive 60Hz displays using a single connector, and Thunderbolt 2 only includes support for DisplayPort 1.2.Update: Lack of 60Hz 4K support on the 2014 Mini is actually an Intel GPU limitation, not a DisplayPort limitation. This document outlines the resolutions and refresh rates supported by various Intel GPUs.

Of the other substantive improvements, the GPUs and the improved storage speeds are probably the biggest. 2012's Minis all included Intel's HD 4000 GPU, the best integrated GPU that shipped with Ivy Bridge processors. The GPU you get in the 2014 Mini depends on the configuration you spring for—the $499 base model includes the Intel HD 5000, the same one you'd get in the 2013 MacBook or the $1,099 iMac. The $699 and $999 models include the Iris 5100, a somewhat faster integrated GPU like what you'd see in a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. Unlike the Iris Pro 5200, the 5100 doesn't include any dedicated eDRAM, which limits its speeds. It's still probably worth the extra cash if you want the fastest Mini you can get.

A quick note about these charts: the HD 5000 results come from a 2013 MacBook Air with a 1.7GHz Core i5-3317U in it, since we don't have numbers for the 1.4GHz model on hand. The base Mini will score a little differently, but the numbers should be more-or-less the same.

Mac Mini 2014 Card Game Instructions

Neither of these new integrated GPUs will turn the Mac Mini into a gaming machine, but they bring the kind of improvements we'd expect in a generational jump. The HD 5000 improves on the HD 4000 by about 50 percent in the GFXBench T-Rex test and about 25 percent faster in the Cinebench R15 GPU test. The Iris 5100 further improves those numbers, beating the HD 4000 by 98 percent in the T-Rex test and about 45 percent in the Cinebench test. Scores in the heavier GFXBench Manhattan test improve as well, though by a much smaller margin—obviously the amount you stand to gain will vary from game to game and task to task.

The jump from SATA III to PCI Express-based solid-state drives provides a nice generational performance boost too, the same one we saw when the various iMacs and MacBooks made the same jump in 2013. Both our 2012 and 2014 Minis are equipped with 128GB SSDs from Samsung. The new Mini has 48 percent better write speeds and 62.2 percent better read speeds. These numbers may vary somewhat from unit to unit, since Apple sources SSDs from a variety of manufacturers.

The base model Mini still comes with a spinning 5400RPM HDD by default, and scores improve by a negligible amount. Spring for the Fusion Drive no matter which model you buy—the way the technology works ensures that you'll usually see the SSD speeds rather than the slow HDD speeds. Saddling a new computer with an HDD in 2014 is cruel to consumer and computer alike.

Finally, the new Mac Mini features improved idle power consumption, likely attributable to both the Haswell CPUs as well as the move from standard DDR3 RAM to LPDDR3. Power consumption under CPU load is much lower, mostly because the 2014 Mini no longer includes a quad-core CPU option. Power consumption under GPU load is a bit higher because of the powerful Iris GPU (we'd expect power consumption numbers for the HD 5000 to be somewhere in between our 2012 and 2014 Minis). Apple says the new Mini is 'the world's most energy-efficient desktop.' We can't vouch for that claim, but it's at least an improvement over its predecessor most of the time.