iM 4,1-14,4 2011 iMac Graphics Card Upgrade

[Polydactyl]

I finally got it working. Long story short, I had to put the old vid card back to get things working so I could see the screen and boot from the thumb drive, follwed by reinstalling the new card and installing Mojave. Everything works, hardware acceleration and all.

A critical step in this was being present when the Mojave install completed this time, so I could run the Mojave patcher in the 10 seconds before the automatic reboot.

 

[liquidtwitch]

Hi, I found this card on eBay: Nvidia Quadro M1000M w/2GB GDDR5, before I buy it I would like to know If it is possible to use it on an iMac 27 2011, I'm already running Mojave 10.14.1(18B57c), just to get hardware acceleration, the system runs ok, only I find some glitches when watching movies, is it worth the trouble? Thank you.

I did a quick Google and I can only see HP firmware for that card. Far as I know there's been no success with any cards running HP firmware, best stick to a card that's been confirmed working.

 

[oscarodas]

I did a quick Google and I can only see HP firmware for that card. Far as I know there's been no success with any cards running HP firmware, best stick to a card that's been confirmed working.

Thank you, I followed your advice and purchased a gtx 660M, from an Alienware laptop, and was told that it will support Mojave, it only cost aud 100. but I couldn't find any drivers around, so if it fails I will swap back to my AMD 6970m.

 

[FlorisVN]

Thank you, I followed your advice and purchased a gtx 660M, from an Alienware laptop, and was told that it will support Mojave, it only cost aud 100. but I couldn't find any drivers around, so if it fails I will swap back to my AMD 6970m.

My GTX765M works OOB withouth the need of any drivers.
I think this is the same for other Nvidia 700M series of cards..

I think you need to try Nvidia Webdriver, and see if that works for your 660M.
if still not, I reccomend you resell or send you card back to the seller and ask your money back !

 

[FlorisVN]

Today I have recieved my K4 and k5 Pro.

Do I also need to put some thermal greese on the power capacitors in the top ??
I think Apple HD6970m did had some of that paste over there.. ?

I have seen some GTX780m cards over here, that does not have paste on them..
( I have marked them in red, the wones I mean..)

What do you guys reccomend.. ??

Currently I have not put any paste on those small power capacitors.
Please see my picture..

 

[SanPellegrino]

Hi, first time poster and longtime lurker here,

I have a mid-2011 iMac 27" sitting here with a faulty GPU. At this point, I'm properly disappointed by Apple (a feeling compounded by a set of recent experiences with the brand). The iMac was already a replacement for an early 2008 MBP that had chronic logicboard heat problems. Back then the explanation was "sorry. Your logic board is fried and we can't exchange it for free under the replacement program since we can't run diagnostics on it (Obviously a dongle won't work on a fried logic board." 😡

Anyway. Fast forward to 2013 and the announcement of the replacement program for those darn ATI GPUs. Me thinks that I'll have the GPU swapped before it dies on me. My serial number is among the affected batch. Apple: "Sorry. We won't be able to change a GPU that's still working". 😡 It seems then that it's never the "right" time to get Apple hardware dying from heat exchanged under replacement programs.

Despite that, all is well with my iMac until earlier this month. Opening photos prompt the GPU to seize and show blue vertical strips, grey strips or just a black screen. This occurs systematically when the GPU has to work harder* (*harder being defined very liberally as browsing on the internet), which is pretty much always.

I spent the last two days reading this thread. Lots of good infos and lots of technobabble I can't quite follow. Having read all of the posts 😱, I think that I figured out what to do.

For reference, I currently have a boot camp partition with Windows 10 but wanted to get rid of the thing anyway. I didn't intend on upgrading but rather fixing my GPU, hence why I'd opt for a cheaper 765m or 780m pulled from an Alienware laptop rather than more recent GPU. I do want to be able to work on my iMac, not turn it into a central heating unit (though it keeps the place already nicely warm 😀).

Step 0 (not yet sure if I'll go for it): Reinstalling High Sierra to have a clean system
Step 1: Preparing the system, i.e. enabling remote desktop, disabling Firevault (not a must but, decades ago, I had laptops with power-on passports that had to be entered blindly and hated it), disabling SIP, Installing the NVidia drivers seems to be superfluous with High Sierra (by recent reports the more popular Alienware 765m and 780m should work OOB), Am I missing any other preparations at this stage?
Step 2: Hardware mods including refitting the heatsink for it to fit on the 765m/780m, applying thermal paste + pads
Step 3: Reassemble and hope for the best

As far as the downsides are concerned, I understand that Mojave runs with a couple of software tweaks, that I won't be able to set the screen brightness (unless via Shades) and I won't get a boot screen (which, let's face it, won't be a problem with only one operating system; I'll keep my ATI around, should I ever need the boot screen)

Is that this essence of currently prevailing opinion? Have I overlooked something crucial?

Thanks in advance,

Edit: Just wanted to add that I baked the MBP logicboard two years after replacing it with my current iMac but don't consider it a viable option for my iMac. The MBP was scrap at that stage and it was either experimenting with it or sending it straight to the dump. I want to keep using my iMac. It's a great machine (excluding the GPU, naturally) which deserves a semi permanent fix. That excludes baking and replacing it with another ATI GPU.

 

[mikehalloran]

You do realize that a 2011 iMac is now seven years old, right? The street price on a 2012 is under $800 and they're Mojave compatible right out of the box.

Do you still have an HHD in it? Heat is the real enemy and those WD Blacks run extremely hot (I've never seen a 2011 with a Seagate). The 2012s on eBay all have spinners but you can get a 2T SSD and pop it in for under $400 including the tools.

I'm a big fan of the 2011. Until Mojave was released, I considered it the best bang for the buck but that was last year. Now it's the 2015.

If there was a turnkey GPU solution that just worked, I'd upgrade my 2010 and 2011. But it doesn't appear that there is. I make my living on mine as does my wife. I don't have time for the experimentation, unfortunately.

Looks like fun, though.

 

[FlorisVN]

I have ended up putting K5 pro also on the power chocs on the GPU.

I have also made an winclone bootcamp Windows 7 image, it has DHCP and RDP both enabled.
this way you can at least check your GPU temps.

If anybody is interested?

You can easly use this image, restore it with winclone, and check your die temps.
By connecting to RDP session.
Teamviewer is also installed, so you can run benchmarks this way as well.
In my opinion a good test to now if you GPU is running cool.

I have some tools pre installed :
Bootcamp 4033 Drivers
MacsFanControl (full speed set to fans)
Nvidia Mobile Drivers (600-100m series cards supported) so Nvidia GTX765m and GTX780m and many others will work with these drivers OOB.
benchmark tools like :
Furmark - Heavenbenchmark AIDA Extreme.

Winclone image is based on an Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit SP1 version. (english)
This image has been tested on iMac 2011 27", but since it has Bootcamp 4033 should work on all supported macs for this bootcamp version. (for example should also work with iMac 2009-2010)

And my GPU Die temps. are arround 30 degrees celcious, so pretty cool I would say.
But I do want to note that I have the fans of the iMac, at all times running at full speed, to get better cooling for the HDD / Power supply and GPU of course.
I like better an total cool iMac, than a hot one...


and, almost forgot.
External display also works within bootcamp.
Only 1 external display works, and used the same thunderbolt port which gave me screenoutput within macOS.
tested with thunderbolt to HDMI adapter to 1080p screen, with Dell Alienware GTX765m 2GB card.

 

[SanPellegrino]

You do realize that a 2011 iMac is now seven years old, right? The street price on a 2012 is under $800 and they're Mojave compatible right out of the box.

I have a rather nice configuration on that machine. i7, plenty of RAM, a retrofitted 850 Pro (dual drive). I wouldn't be tweaking the GPU if it wasn't in the process of dying, hence the reason why I'm looking into changing it for either a 765m or a 780m.

By the latest reports, the mod seems to be relatively OOB. Just wanted to confirm that...

 

[weckart]

(I've never seen a 2011 with a Seagate).

Mine had a Seagate. Apple set up a replacement programme for it as certain Seagates (including mine) were liable to fail at any time.

https://www.apple.com/mt/support/exchange_repair/imac-harddrive.html

 

[mikehalloran]

Mine had a Seagate. Apple set up a replacement programme for it as certain Seagates (including mine) were liable to fail at any time.

https://www.apple.com/mt/support/exchange_repair/imac-harddrive.html

I knew they came with 'em. By the time I got those 2010–2011s, Apple had installed WD Blacks.

It was so bad that I stopped sending Seagate drives back for warranty as the replacements often died within a month—of course, clients would think it was my fault.

Even my friends who worked there and at Apple were telling me to buy WD — which I still do but it's the Reds for Time Machine only.

I will never, ever install an HHD into a Mac again. I may buy a 2015 with a fusion drive for myself but the blade and HHD will be replaced before I've had it 24 hours. That or buy a 2017 with a 2T blade and use a TB external for a few years till AppleCare runs out, then I'll install the SSD inside... unless I buy an iMac Pro with a 4T blade but that's a hell of a lot of money. The work I do could really use more than 4 cores.

 

[Reactorvisual]

Hey Fokser, awesome, thanks for the tip, it solved the random lines problem. But still no boot screen so right now for installing bootcamp, I am trying to install Windows 10 into a dedicated SSD in my Macbook, and the try to transplant it into my iMac. The idea is to switch from Mac to Windows using the Preferences, choosing which drive to use to boot as startup with alt will be tricky.

vkd yep my graphic card was from a dell Alienware laptop, the full eBay description is DELL ALIENWARE 17 18 NVIDIA GTX 765M 2GB GDDR5 LAPTOP VIDEO CARD 5YPW3 9R3F5 USA, bought from " ascendtech", it works perfectly for me, I have tried playing some Heroes of the Storm, the performances are ok, somewhat comparable as what it was with my 6970, maybe better, I don't know I have not played the game for a while 🙂

If that can help. Also, totally out of subject, but I bought the iFixit Pro Tool kit, it is a really good product, it would have helped me quite a bit for installing the graphic card. I used it to replace a 2015 iMac HDD by SSD, totally doable if you have already opened your 2011 iMac. Happy fixing guys!

 

[fuggy]

Hi guys,
new on this forum. I tried to read as much as I could (past couple of pages) in order not to pollute and ask already asked before questions...

The answer is till not clear to me. My situation : I have a mid 2011 iMac with the A1312 Radeon HD 6970M 1G which, as you may guess like all others, almost dead. The GPU is barely able to boot, and if it is, it will sooner or later get full of vertical bars, will start flicking, turn grey, whatsoever... It looks like what everybody else is experiencing as the weakness of these iMac.

I would like to get it back to life. I checked on eBay, Amazon and Ali and found out we can have replacement cards for around 200 to 300$US, sometimes a little bit more (if comes with heatsink), sometimes a little less, when only the card is provided. Then I stumbled in this forum where someone said that everywhere we can find these cards, they are either used cards (so will stop working sooner or later because of this same problem they all have), or fake called "new" as there are no new cards ? Question #1 : They would only be refurbished or reflow cards in reality ? Am I right ?

Question #2 : If I replace only the card, I have seen on many posts and other sources that it looks to be stick to the heat sink with some kind of paste. Do I have to apply this paste on my replacement card if I keep my old heat sink ?

Question #3 : There seem to be fully "compatible" cards made from Dell Graphics card... Does this work like a brand new original ? Something like this : https://www.amazon.com/Graphics-MC8...8&qid=1539797984&sr=1-2&keywords=Radeon+6970M

Question #4 : Is there any other compatible which can swap the original without having to flash anything ?

Question #5 :
Just to make this post a wrap-up of everything done about this AMD 6970M which appears to die for everyone out there these days, is this baking solution we read here and there something that may work but only for a couple of weeks, making it just a temporary fix ?

Question #6 : Based on your experience, what is the best, quick and original replacement looking solution to get these great iMac 27" machines back to life ?

Question #7 : My card being a A1312, ATI Radeon HD 6970M, 1G DDR5, can I replace it with a A1312 6770M 512MB card ?

It is wonderful to have passionate people like you trying and sharing all these with us.

This is just intended, humbly, to wrap-up everything.

Thank you guys !

 

[Reactorvisual]

hello, thanks for your post, 2 questions:

1- does this card worked for you just plug and play? or did some mos/installation stuff

2- what OS you are currently using and if you have upgraded it.
[doublepost=1539806585][/doublepost]

Hello everyone,
Progress has been made on my 780m install on my 27 inch 2011 iMac. In its current state it is running with no internal screen attached, however I can confirm it works. I modified my X-bracket to clear some capacitors on the back side of the board as well as the heatsink for clearance of 2 coils. For the most important news, one of the rear thunderbolt/displayport displays video in 4k@60hz which i'm surprised by, making this upgrade worth it. In the future I will be booting Mac OS Mojave from this with the 780m installed, so far the required kexts that need modification are IO80211Family and AppleHDA.kext.

View attachment 765862 View attachment 765863

Hello, did it worked plug and play? any software/driver installation?
[doublepost=1539806746][/doublepost]

Hello everyone,
Progress has been made on my 780m install on my 27 inch 2011 iMac. In its current state it is running with no internal screen attached, however I can confirm it works. I modified my X-bracket to clear some capacitors on the back side of the board as well as the heatsink for clearance of 2 coils. For the most important news, one of the rear thunderbolt/displayport displays video in 4k@60hz which i'm surprised by, making this upgrade worth it. In the future I will be booting Mac OS Mojave from this with the 780m installed, so far the required kexts that need modification are IO80211Family and AppleHDA.kext.

View attachment 765862 View attachment 765863

what do you mean no internal screen attached???? why did you disconected it? is because the card wont work with it?

 

[highvoltage12v]

hello, thanks for your post, 2 questions:

1- does this card worked for you just plug and play? or did some mos/installation stuff

2- what OS you are currently using and if you have upgraded it.
[doublepost=1539806585][/doublepost]
Hello, did it worked plug and play? any software/driver installation?
[doublepost=1539806746][/doublepost]
what do you mean no internal screen attached???? why did you disconected it? is because the card wont work with it?

(1)The card has been installed Not really any software modifications. More of hardware modifications. Please pay attention to how multiple members have modified the X-bracket to prevent shorting with SMD (Surface Mounted devices) on the back of the PCB.

(2) I'm typing on it now with Mac OS Mojave installed. SSD also has High Sierra on Partition 1 because if you break Mojave, EG software update rewrites PlatformSupport.plist, it won't boot, and you need to PRAM reset and boot too H.S to fix this issue. So both OS's are installed until we get an official BIOS/EFI that has boot screens.

"what do you mean no internal screen attached???? why did you disconected it? is because the card wont work with it?"
(3) This was during the testing phase. I installed the card into the logic board placed it into the housing connected the necessary connectors, and booted it with no LCD but a display plugged in VIA Display-port. This is done because (A) the EDP (some call it LVDS its not in this case) is very fragile and sometimes you might have to reseat the MXM card 5-6 times. (B) you want to pay attention to the diagnostic LED's on the board.

 

[oscarodas]

Today I have recieved my K4 and k5 Pro.

Do I also need to put some thermal greese on the power capacitors in the top ??
I think Apple HD6970m did had some of that paste over there.. ?

I have seen some GTX780m cards over here, that does not have paste on them..
( I have marked them in red, the wones I mean..)

What do you guys reccomend.. ??

Currently I have not put any paste on those small power capacitors.
Please see my picture..

I did pull my graphics card (HD6970M) and indeed it has that white pasta all over the area you have marked.

 

[highvoltage12v]

Hi !
I'm in the same condition. I Think the best way to do the trick in "blind mode" is this one (assuming you have only 1 boot partition on the Macintosh HD)

First detach all the usb/fw hard drive except the USB stick with the Mojave installer

Second, switch off the Mac

Third, restart yor mac pressing the ALT button on the Keyboard.

After a reasonable time (30-50 secs) look at the status Led of your usbstick, if is all ok the Led stop blinking. Now is time to switch the boot disk from the internal Macintosh HD to the external usb stick, to do this you have to press ONLY one time the RIGHT ARROW on your keyboard and then the RETURN key.
If is all ok the stick Led begins to blink, the installer is now loading and in 10/20 secs it will show you the Mojave installer.

I've tried the trick WITH THE BOOT SCREEN (I've not already switch the graphic card) but is the best way instead trying to switch the boot disk from the Operating System.

Please give us some feedback!

p.s. sorry for my poor English!!!

It's not like the Mac Pro's where it will go to the option screen blindly. It just ignores all commands and proceeds to boot. Even trying Target Disk Mode from System Preferences doesn't work. I have tried all of these months ago. I even went as far as to buy dual layer DVD's and burn a Sierra installer to it. It will actually boot a DVD when holding C but no display after 40 minutes. The only way I can get around this is having a known good OS on partition 1 and doing an PRAM reset so it can boot from it.
[doublepost=1539810047][/doublepost]

Today I have recieved my K4 and k5 Pro.

Do I also need to put some thermal greese on the power capacitors in the top ??
I think Apple HD6970m did had some of that paste over there.. ?

I have seen some GTX780m cards over here, that does not have paste on them..
( I have marked them in red, the wones I mean..)

What do you guys reccomend.. ??

Currently I have not put any paste on those small power capacitors.
Please see my picture..

I never did those capacitors because when I lined up my card with the heatsink there was too much spacing between the heatsink and the Caps. I wouldn't be concerned they can handle 110C temps and would most likely be using the PCB to disperse the heat at that point.

Here is what I keep my fan RPMs at. Next time I'm in the iMac I will also create my own Air duct guide for the HDD fan. I have an SSD in there that only gets to ~34C.

 

[weckart]

Even my friends who worked there and at Apple were telling me to buy WD — which I still do but it's the Reds for Time Machine only.

That dodgy Seagate I pulled from my iMac is still going strong in my Mac Pro. On the other hand, I bought a WD Red recently for additional storage. It lasted all of 2 hours before I got I/O errors and it died while I tried to run diagnostics on it. Life ain’t fair.

 

[Mostxclent]

Today I completed the install on the GTX770, took a couple trys a few case modifications but I got this working in a mid2011 21.5" Imac without too much difficulty, no drivers installed on High Sierra. Benchmarked with Unigine Heaven 4 score 424. No Idea what I had before with the Radeon 6550 card. Does perform better on Liftoff higher frame rates, resolution and better rendering. So i am pretty happy. Downside is no screen dimming, and the fans run allout all the time. Let me know If I can help with your project.

 

[highvoltage12v]

Today I completed the install on the GTX770, took a couple trys a few case modifications but I got this working in a mid2011 21.5" Imac without too much difficulty, no drivers installed on High Sierra. Benchmarked with Unigine Heaven 4 score 424. No Idea what I had before with the Radeon 6550 card. Does perform better on Liftoff higher frame rates, resolution and better rendering. So i am pretty happy. Downside is no screen dimming, and the fans run allout all the time. Let me know If I can help with your project.

Interesting you have a 770m with internal display working, earlier posts in this thread told everyone to stay away from the 770m because the internal display never worked. This is the vBIOS that is shown in system profiler. https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/142849/dell-gtx770m-3072-130418

https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-Dell-A...MXM-3-0-GDDR5-Laptop-Video-Card/391986881512? This eBay link shows the same card with Bios revision on the back, I'm thinking I should go do my 21.5" 2011 iMac. You didn't have to do any heatsink modifications because you're on a 21.5, Just X bracket mods like my 780m.

 

[Mostxclent]

Interesting you have a 770m with internal display working, earlier posts in this thread told everyone to stay away from the 770m because the internal display never worked. This is the vBIOS that is shown in system profiler. https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/142849/dell-gtx770m-3072-130418

https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-Dell-A...MXM-3-0-GDDR5-Laptop-Video-Card/391986881512? This eBay link shows the same card with Bios revision on the back, I'm thinking I should go do my 21.5" 2011 iMac. You didn't have to do any heatsink modifications because you're on a 21.5, Just X bracket mods like my 780m.

Yeah everything is working fine, after reboot the fans returned to normal, I did install aps to control the fans and a dimmer slider I found on the app store to sort out the brightness control. I did nothing to modify the x bracket or the heatsink, I did however shim out the bracket that supports the heatsink tubes to the card and case, and wrapped it with tape where it was close to the graphics card. I left the screw out at the heat exchanger at the top too. PS that is the same card I bought off ebay.

 

[FlorisVN]

Yeah everything is working fine, after reboot the fans returned to normal, I did install aps to control the fans and a dimmer slider I found on the app store to sort out the brightness control. I did nothing to modify the x bracket or the heatsink, I did however shim out the bracket that supports the heatsink tubes to the card and case, and wrapped it with tape where it was close to the graphics card. I left the screw out at the heat exchanger at the top too. PS that is the same card I bought off ebay.

Which app from the App store have you used ??
Shades is a little buggy for me..
It also worked better on high sierra than on Mojave.

 

[coolbits]

It sounds like over on Netkas forums Rominator is asking for your help "The guy who got screen showing iMac display as internal and brightness control showing up could be a help." http://forum.netkas.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=mkdv0vpq6ranemedq27rg0lmse3o5imc&topic=13815.30. But if I recall your work over on Insanely Mac it was editing PNLF info in the DSDT. I'm not sure how that would translate to working on a rom and DCB tables though.

Interesting, will register there and see what can be done. 🙂
PNLF does not need editing as this is real mac and already has all that stuff in DSDT that non apple hw needs.

 

[SanPellegrino]

I've taken the plunge and ordered a Dell gtx 765m. Price was significantly lower than the 780m I saw. None of them really convinced me. Most of them either didn't have the stickers on them or had completely different vBios numbers, P/Ns, etc. That definitely put me off blowing 300€ on a card of questionable origin.

The 765m's price was about 1/3 of the 780m and, by the looks of it, should be the correct Dell one that has been used successfully by another user here and elsewhere.

PS: If the repair's successful, then I'll probably switch out the WD Black too, replacing it with a 1 TB SSD drive. I could get one of them for the price of my original 256 GB 850 Pro.

 

[dblack965]

Does anyone know what the connector labeled J1 is for on an mxm card?