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iM 4,1-14,4 2011 iMac Graphics Card Upgrade
- Thread starter MichaelDT
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Use GT130m BIOS.
Hey, i love My cheap K610M
Hahahahaha j/k
Because of this post, Aliexpress sellers have raised the price of K610m to 49$....
Hi everyone.
This is my first post, please be gentle.
Been following this thread for some time and I finally did it - upgraded my iMac 2011 27" i5-2500S 12MB RAM with Radeon HD 6770M 512MB on High Sierra with a nVidia Quadro K2100M. On a separate 256GB SSD running off Seagate's Thunderbolt Go-Flex adapter, installed Catalina first and a few days later Big Sur 11.0.1. TL;DR: It all works!
I wanted to say a big thank you to @Nick [D]vB, @dosdude1, @Ausdauersportler, @nikey22, @highvoltage12v, @Barry K. Nathan, @xanderon, @Curtis Gross and those involved in making brightness control work with OpenCore. You have all keep my iMac 2011 alive and well, and I cannot thank you all enough!
I purchase my K2100M from Aliexpress and bought the cheapest one available - on sale it was US$68 with free delivery. In hindsight, it may not have been the best choice of seller. The card arrive with Elpida memory chips although the seller's photo had SKHynix memory chips. So only 1GB is recognised.
I am wondering if anyone has seen green square boxes on their images in Safari on Big Sur with this K2100M card? They do not always appear and they are not there when using Chrome Browser and I am unsure if it is an issue with K2100M or Big Sur. Apologies if this question is best asked in the Big Sur forum.
Lastly, I needed to keep working in High Sierra with the K2100M card and the LCD was getting very hot 65 degrees C (my ambient is 29 degrees C), so I edited OpenCore 0.6.2 config.plist and set the PowerTimeoutKernelPanic=0 because without that change Opencore would hang when I tried to boot into High Sierra. Now, brightness control works in High Sierra too with Opencore.
This is my first post, please be gentle.
Been following this thread for some time and I finally did it - upgraded my iMac 2011 27" i5-2500S 12MB RAM with Radeon HD 6770M 512MB on High Sierra with a nVidia Quadro K2100M. On a separate 256GB SSD running off Seagate's Thunderbolt Go-Flex adapter, installed Catalina first and a few days later Big Sur 11.0.1. TL;DR: It all works!
I wanted to say a big thank you to @Nick [D]vB, @dosdude1, @Ausdauersportler, @nikey22, @highvoltage12v, @Barry K. Nathan, @xanderon, @Curtis Gross and those involved in making brightness control work with OpenCore. You have all keep my iMac 2011 alive and well, and I cannot thank you all enough!
I purchase my K2100M from Aliexpress and bought the cheapest one available - on sale it was US$68 with free delivery. In hindsight, it may not have been the best choice of seller. The card arrive with Elpida memory chips although the seller's photo had SKHynix memory chips. So only 1GB is recognised.
I am wondering if anyone has seen green square boxes on their images in Safari on Big Sur with this K2100M card? They do not always appear and they are not there when using Chrome Browser and I am unsure if it is an issue with K2100M or Big Sur. Apologies if this question is best asked in the Big Sur forum.
Lastly, I needed to keep working in High Sierra with the K2100M card and the LCD was getting very hot 65 degrees C (my ambient is 29 degrees C), so I edited OpenCore 0.6.2 config.plist and set the PowerTimeoutKernelPanic=0 because without that change Opencore would hang when I tried to boot into High Sierra. Now, brightness control works in High Sierra too with Opencore.
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C'mon , spread some K610M love, i got mine for 25 USD locally. Ones garbage is others Gold.
Hi guys,
I tried as much as I can to search for answer but couldn't really find what I needed... Anyway, mid '10 iMac 27 came with HD 5750, and i did the X3480 and SSD upgrades a while back running High Sierra and Bootcamp... This is my backup desktop so trying to experiment with it a little and have a Clevo GTX 880M with '11 heatsink coming in...
At the time, the seller told me his friend is running the exact same setup with flashed vbios fine... But doing some diggin' here later and found someone mentioned the Clevo GTX 880M is not good enough for flashing? Can someone confirm if Clevo GTX 880M works? Or did I just picked up another paper weight? Thanks!
I tried as much as I can to search for answer but couldn't really find what I needed... Anyway, mid '10 iMac 27 came with HD 5750, and i did the X3480 and SSD upgrades a while back running High Sierra and Bootcamp... This is my backup desktop so trying to experiment with it a little and have a Clevo GTX 880M with '11 heatsink coming in...
At the time, the seller told me his friend is running the exact same setup with flashed vbios fine... But doing some diggin' here later and found someone mentioned the Clevo GTX 880M is not good enough for flashing? Can someone confirm if Clevo GTX 880M works? Or did I just picked up another paper weight? Thanks!
These green boxes are IMHO no artefacts showing a dying card, these are glitches observable with different Nvidia cards most likely when using Safari on Catalina?
I cannot explain in detail why this happens. It could be an error while the screen or parts of the screen gets a redraw command from the Finder/OS.
Have never seen this with AMD cards. Because on the Big Sur thread some guys are complaining about other GUI artifacts (color and transparency) with 2012-2013 iMacs having Nvidia GPU chips soldered on board one could come to the conclusion that we might just face another Apple/Safari bug.
OpenCore:
Move to 0.6.3 be downloading the new EFI folder and replace and rename the config list (Nvidia). I pulled 0.6.2 back.
Big Sur:
No problems known for K2100M/2011 as long as you are using my version of the @Barry K. Nathan micro patcher. I fact the installation of Big Sur is much smoother than ever. I have moved all working platforms.
No, could by me. I made the mistake to order two of these cards, immediately thereafter prices where raised.
Both cards came in dead. This about AliExpress and old used Nvidia cards. I added a warning on post #1 about this.
Thanks for your feedback @Ausdauersportler.
Those green box artefacts were from Safari running on Big Sur 11.0.1 - installed Big Sur with micro patcher by @Barry K. Nathan and with the --useOC switch for patch-kexts - thank you @Ausdauersportler for sorting all the fixes for 2011 iMac. The card seems to run fine so I'd concur that the issue lies with some Safari bug. No such green artefacts with Chrome Browser.
Moved to OpenCore 0.6.3 - all good. Booting up fine in both Catalina and Big Sur with brightness control.
In Big Sur, have you tried replacing AppleGVA.framework (from High Sierra) to get hardware acceleration to work?
May also be worthwhile adding a warning on post #1 about the K2100M with Elpida memory chips.
If you are going on this route, check my app in my signature, works better compared to the Brightness Slider app.
I would agree, but on the other hand this is much too specific! Since the seller does not show real product pictures in most cases (I have seen AliEpress offers showing Nvidia cards offering AMD cards) it does not even help.
My experience with the first post - people do not read it. Making it longer and more complex the very same people with perceptions problems complaining about a deficit of transparency.
We are trapped. Some want every detail on it, others ignore every detail.
Possibly another spoiler tag may do it (memory problems with K2100/K3100/Clevo 780/880 not working in 2011/AMD cards not posting an any)....
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I still have problems to fix sleep mode in my iMac Mid 2011 with an k610m. I have installed the patch, like in image 3 of your post. What can i do?
First please add your signature. I will not answer in future any questions without this.
Then please re read my post and view all the attached pictures and the names I gave the pictures and find out what went wrong yourself!
Edit: Possibly there is also a general bug, but before I search bugs you should at least try to use it in the correct way.
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Nobody got it working possibly because some more code is missing than only the one from the High Sierra version of AppleGVA.framework. I am afraid this feature is gone unless somebody spends more time into run time errors for software usage it. So one could find out which libs are needed.
@Wania spend a lot time in testing different Big Sur beta and my patcher has an experimental option --gva which will install the old framework, but it does not work and it will possible also make the system unstable.
Edit: PowerTimeoutKernelPanic=1 will be needed with Big Sur....
For those (like me) who were holding on to their old iMacs until the new M1s came out and are ready to turn their modded iMacs into a display, thought I'd share this:
With my 2010 iMac, equipped with a 765m card that otherwise does not support brightness control in any way, when running High Sierra in Target Display Mode (Mini DisplayPort), brightness starts at 100% but it can be reduced with CMD+F1 on a keyboard connected to the 2010 iMac in TDM mode.
The new brightness level persists through sleep/wake, but after disconnect/reconnect it's back to 100%.
With my 2010 iMac, equipped with a 765m card that otherwise does not support brightness control in any way, when running High Sierra in Target Display Mode (Mini DisplayPort), brightness starts at 100% but it can be reduced with CMD+F1 on a keyboard connected to the 2010 iMac in TDM mode.
The new brightness level persists through sleep/wake, but after disconnect/reconnect it's back to 100%.
On the Big Sur thread there was this comment about the artefacts....
In Safari select Develop menu-->Experimental Features. Make sure 'VP9 decoder' and 'webRTC VP9 codec' are both checked.
Could you please post you working High Sierra 0.6.3 K111Nvidia config.plist. For a long time I had no such card to test myself.
Don’t need bootscreen. Would love brightness, but until that rom comes out I’ll leave mine as it is. “If it aint broken, don’t fix it!”.
I did post here a newer version of nvflash_linux, give it a try, maybe you're lucky enough it supports your bios chip (and let us know it it does or not).
Sorry, I have now added my signature.
I have executed the installer as shown in picture 3 "NVIDIA-2011".
Should I only have been allowed to make the selection as shown on the picture "k610m- k1100m-k2100m"?
If so, is there a way to undo the installation?
If I select only the two programs now, I always have the message that the installation has failed. (surely because the programs are already installed)
I have executed the installer as shown in picture 3 "NVIDIA-2011".
Should I only have been allowed to make the selection as shown on the picture "k610m- k1100m-k2100m"?
If so, is there a way to undo the installation?
If I select only the two programs now, I always have the message that the installation has failed. (surely because the programs are already installed)
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In fact MacOS package management does not know any deinstallation command. The only solution is to write another package deleting installed packages. This is not (easily) possible here because there are two extensions overwriting stock Catalina existing ones.
The best start would be to install Catalina again without deleting your partition or container (your data will stay untouched) and then you may give the package installer another try and read before pressing any button. As I said before: My intentions were that you helped me with the development by giving feedback and not that I help you through an installation.
Thanks! Your writeup on Github about how it changes the perceived brightness without turning down the backlight really cleared things up!
I've given OpenCore/Catalina Loader another shot today, but it still won't work. I've read the Open Core section of Post 1 a dozen times, and I've read through the Using Catalina Loader on iMac 1.0 PDF a dozen times (I skipped section 8 on installing extensions because it says its for 10.14 and 10.15, but I'm still on 10.13 so I should skip this part, right?). I can't see what I've possibly done wrong. I made sure i was on the latest firmware before starting. I formatted the SD card as MacOS Extended, GUID, restored the most recent Catalina Loader DMG using Disk Utility, copied the EFI folder from 0.6.3 over, renamed the NVIDIA 2011 27 plist file to config.plist. I made all the invisible files visible and checked, and my Catalina Loader image looks exactly like the screenshot in the CL post. So I set it to boot from the CL SD card, and it does. The backlight works right away, with no delay like before. But then the progress bar gets halfway, the screen dims, and it freezes. I've left it here for an hour just to see, but it never goes any further. Rebooting results in the same thing over and over. BUT, if I reset PRAM and reboot, it boots fine, with backlight all the way, but no screen dimming and no brightness controls when it's fully booted.
So what did I do wrong? And please don't say read post 1. Just ignore this if that's all you got. And I don't mean that to be rude, but just to save us both the time. Thanks in advance.
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Hi,
first of all, many thanks to the developers of this VBIOS mod!
I collected all infromation about my Quadro K3000M 2GB variant to support the development of a fix for the issue with cards showing 4GB instead of 2GB of this variant.
Card Info:
DELL Part No. 07RPRH - 699-52051-0501-100E
Model Quadro K3000M 2GB
FCC Model No. P2051
VRAM Hynix H5GQ1H24BFR - T2C
Org. VBIOS Version 80.04.5A.00.01 (dump attached)
Strapping resistor is 15.4K on my card
With the VBIOS from the list this card shows functional bootscreen and brightness control and the issue with random crashing after around 5-10min.
This card is available for testing ROMs and I don't care if it doesn't survive this test.
first of all, many thanks to the developers of this VBIOS mod!
I collected all infromation about my Quadro K3000M 2GB variant to support the development of a fix for the issue with cards showing 4GB instead of 2GB of this variant.
Card Info:
DELL Part No. 07RPRH - 699-52051-0501-100E
Model Quadro K3000M 2GB
FCC Model No. P2051
VRAM Hynix H5GQ1H24BFR - T2C
Org. VBIOS Version 80.04.5A.00.01 (dump attached)
Strapping resistor is 15.4K on my card
With the VBIOS from the list this card shows functional bootscreen and brightness control and the issue with random crashing after around 5-10min.
This card is available for testing ROMs and I don't care if it doesn't survive this test.
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Just to let you know the imac mid 2011 27 quadro k3100m runs nice on micropatcher v 0.5.2pre i get full brightness now well done.