Chosen Solution
Hi, I just bought a used 2012 Mac Mini off of eBay. The listing was for a 2012 i5 with 4 GB of RAM. I already owned an SSD and 8GB of RAM to upgrade the system. The listing stated that the Mac did not include a hard drive, but works perfectly. After opening the Mac Mini, I quickly realized that this was NOT the i5 version, but is the i7 server edition with the 2.6 GHz processor (pleasantly surprised). I successfully installed an SSD, and went to power the computer on and… nothing. The chime sounds, the light on the front lights up, but the fan does not spin, and there is no video signal (I tried both HDMI, and mini-displayport). Wired keyboard IS being recognized (I successfully reset the PRAM, etc), but still no video. I have tested the RAM (on my MacBook Pro 2012), and the RAM is fine. I got a GREAT deal on this Mac ($110 after tax and shipping), so I would like returning it to be my last resort. Does this sound like a bad logic board? Would I be getting the boot chime, and having the keyboard respond if the logic board were bad? Could the CPU be bad? This has integrated graphics, so there is no GPU to fail…. If anyone has any recommendations to solve my problem, I would appreciate it. Thank you.
UPDATE- I figured out my issue. The issue was NOT with my Mac Mini at all. It was actually the TV/monitor I had it hooked up to. My TV/monitor has a “quick start” feature where the TV never powers completely down. This must have screwed up the handshake with the Mac Mini video output. I turned this feature off and rebooted, and guess what?… Everything works perfectly now. 4 days of testing and powering off and on, and all seems stable.
It does sound like the logic board has a problem ;-{ It might be repairable! Even replacing it still might be worth it! Mac Mini Logic Board 2.6GHz QC i7 - Recycled Apple P/N 661-7019
