I had an acquaintance send me an engineering sample of a 2.16GHz Merom T7400 CPU. Within an hour of receiving the processor, I had my 20" iMac disassembled, ready to replace the stock T2500.
Disassembling the iMac was not fun at all. Usually I enjoy disassembling my Macs but this was one exception. It is much more difficult to access than any other Mac I have owned which includes pretty much every line over the last 5 years. First the front bezel has to come off which involves removing a few torx screws and then using a credit card bent at a 30 degree angle to release a latch in the upper corners that you access through the vent. Once the cover is off, you have to peel back gobs of EMI tape and the EMI shield. Next remove the LCD. Now you have access to the logic board. Proceed to remove 13 different wired connections to the logic board, many of which are tiny and frail and quite the little boogers to get out. Remove the logic board (of course they had to put the CPU on the back side) and the rather large heatsink/heatpipe contraption which is shared between the GPU and CPU. Finally, you can remove the old CPU and replace it with your new 64-bit capable, 4MB L2 cache having Merom.
When it came time to reassemble everything, I was torn between rushing through it to finally hear that reassuring startup "bong" and taking my time to make sure everything was correctly put back together. I only missed one thing and that was reconnecting the Airport antenna but it was easily accessible under the EMI shield. So with everything put back together with only the front bezel still off, I start up the machine. Oh, that beautiful bong. It is music to my ears.
Since it was so late, I just ran a quick Xbench test to see the difference between the T2500 and T7400. The results for the T2500 can be found here and the T7400 can be found here. As you can see, the CPU test was 45% faster with the new CPU but this is just one test and Xbench is generally very limited. If any of you have any tests that you would like me to run, post them here and I try and run them in a timely fashion (assuming I have the software, of course).
I did have grand intentions of taking photos along the way but that fell by the wayside once I got into it. The pictures would have been largely unremarkable anyway as there are a number of pictures of Intel iMac guts already posted on the internet. One thing of note, the earliest pictures to be released of a disassembled Intel iMac on KODAWARISAN were completely different from mine, especially the layout of the cooling system. I thought it was a bit unusual.
Lastly, as a preemptive strike to all of you who have to ask why, I respond with "Because it's there."
