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

[BadBiscuit]

View attachment 1773340
Hello everyone,

I noticed there are still a few members that have K1000M cards around.

I've put together this K1000M rom to enable Brightness control. You will still need to use Opencore to do the ACPI injections, but at least we have a way to control brightness on these older cards now. Just another option.

Enjoy!

Is the same fix possible for the K2000M card? I have one of those, but no longer use it because of its lack of brightness control. Would be nice to put it back in service at some point. Pardon my ignorance if the K1000M and K2000M ROM is not similar; I just assume based on name that they might be.

 

[jay508]

** NVIDIA Quadro K5100M Mac Edition ROM **
Genuine Native Boot Screen & Brightness Control


​

View attachment 942192

I put together this UGA-based rom for the K5100M (N15E-Q5-A2):

• Does not require a 3rd party bootloader like OpenCore
• Needs modification of the AppleBacklight.kext [AppleIntelPanelA/ApplePanels/F10Ta007] brightness stepping
• Stock Quadro K5100M GPU clock/RAM speeds
• Full acceleration OpenCL

Brightness Control Stepping Modifcation

-Turn computer on, hold down Command(⌘)-R
-Choose Utilities > Terminal
-Enter:csrutil disable
-MacOS Catalina: requires you to make root writeable: sudo mount -uw /
-Reboot
-Download and open 'Kext Utility v2.6.6'

-Navigate to S/L/E (System/Library/Extensions)
-Copy "AppleBacklight.kext" to Desktop
-Edit: AppleBacklight.kext/Contents/Info.plist
-Scroll down to: IOKitPersonalities > AppleIntelPanelA > ApplePanels
-There you find several Apple LCD profiles.
-For the iMac 2011 27" machine locate:

<key>F10Ta007</key>
<data>
ABEABgALABQAHAAnADMAPwBOAFwAZwBzAIEAkQClAL8A2wD/
</data>

-Change the <data> section to:
ABEAAgA3AF8AigCzAOsBJAFnAakB1AIJAlQCogL4A00DlgRpBGk=

-Drag your modded kext into Kext Utility, allow it correct permissions
-"Applebacklight.kext.bak" folder will be created
-Reboot

The above data pattern will allow for a wider span of steppings for the brightness control and utilizes more of the capacity of the HD3000. If you have a different machine, your panel ID can be found by going to System Preferences > Displays > Color > Open Profile > mmod

Caveats post-install/Bugs:
-16bit resolution glitch of UGA_DRAW_PROTOCOL - temporary solution: activate a sleep cycle and return, this should now clear the issue.

warning: as stated previously these cards are based on a WSON flash package and therefore are much more difficult to recover from a bad flash. Please take precautions and verify flashing.

Thanks to @ZenSurfeur for his very thorough testing and successful implementation. He is very pleased with the ROM and has done extensive tests.

"insanely Great!"
-Steve Jobs


View attachment 942216 View attachment 942217

View attachment 942218

**Update**
12-20-2020 - ROM adjusted to 1900Mhz vram and 810 Mhz TDP for better stability and windows 7/10 compatability

Hello @nikey22
Samsung video memory k5100m using this vbios windows7 windows10 replace multiple versions of graphics card drivers boot icon a black screen, forced shutdown boot sometimes will not black screen need luck random uncontrollable can enter the system everything is normal. What is the problem?
Elpida graphics k3100m vbios version K3100m v4 with k5100m condition exactly the same random fast into the system on the black screen.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

[Mesh_Hun]

Hello everyone, I am from China. I have a mid-2010 iMac, I want to install a wx4170,but I searched everywhere but couldn't find it. Whoever has a spare wx4170, I can buy it.

 

[jazo97]

First of all, what exactly what are you trying to achieve? Most likely OCLP will do what you need to do.

I just wanted to get rid of the Black screen on Catalina, thanks, however, i found the way thanks.

 

[emdirector]

So my iMac with 880M functioned great for a few weeks. Today I got black screen all of a sudden mid work session. I did only word processing and internet browsing (no gaming or overly stressing the GPU). Any ideas what this could be? Any pointers would be appreciated. Thank you.

UPDATE: I successfully connected to screen sharing to the iMac, and there is NO trace of ANY GPU in System Information, confirming my suspicion that there is an issue with GPU. But what is the issue?

Sorry. Double post.

 

[emdirector]

** NVIDIA Geforce GTX880M Mac Edition ROM **
** NVIDIA Geforce GTX870M Mac Edition ROM **
** NVIDIA Geforce GTX860M Mac Edition ROM **
Genuine Native Boot Screen & Brightness Control​

View attachment 942200

Pre-installation Requirements:
- iMac12,2 (27-inch Mid 2011) Mac-942B59F58194171B (Tested machine)
- BootROM: 87.0.0.0.0. Please use High Sierra to update your BootROM to latest version.
- One of the following GPUs:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M
N15E-GX-A2, MXM-B (3.0)
8GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M
N15E-GT-A2, MXM-B (3.0)
non-functional cards/original_ROMs:
80.04.EF.00.A2 (MSI)
80.04.F7.00.0C (MSI)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M
Kepler (GK104) N15P-GX-B-A2
Base ROMs:
80.04.F5.00.06
80.04.E8.00.0D
80.04.E9.00.03
Maxwell (GM107) N15P-GX-A1? - non-function with MacOS; cannot trust sources with GPU Variant
Base ROMs:
82.07.24.00.19
82.07.34.00.03
82.07.34.00.08
82.07.49.00.05

The GTX880M is the first 8GB VRAM card to work in our machines! I now have as much vram as system ram. I'm happy to report that macOS sees all the ram. It is boosting fully even at base clock speeds. When I purchased this card, the rivets were very long and kept too much of the GPU away from the heatsink surface. It was thermal throttling early as it sensed an overheat situation. When I removed the rivets, and used screws to secure it, I was able to get a much tighter seal and the card boosted properly.

Tested on a 2011 iMac using High Sierra 10.13.6. Please feel free to test on other MacOS versions, I will update this post as necessary with success/failures.

• These ROMs do not require a 3rd party bootloader like OpenCore.
• They will require a modification of the base AppleIntelPanelA/ApplePanels/F10Ta007 brightness stepping.
• The frame-buffer depth issues remains for now, and can be temporarily corrected by entering a sleep cycle.

As previous, these roms should bring back:

⦁ Genuine native brightness control
⦁ Genuine ‘gray’ early-boot screen (stage 1 & 2 progress bar)
⦁ Genuine macOS bootloader compliance

Post-installation Requirements:
Brightness Control Stepping Mod:
-Turn computer on, hold down Command(⌘)-R
-Choose Utilities > Terminal
-Enter:csrutil disable
-MacOS Catalina: requires you to make root writeable: sudo mount -uw /
-Reboot
-Download and open 'Kext Utility v2.6.6'

-Navigate to S/L/E (System/Library/Extensions)
-Copy "AppleBacklight.kext" to Desktop
-Edit: AppleBacklight.kext/Contents/Info.plist
-Scroll down to: IOKitPersonalities > AppleIntelPanelA > ApplePanels
-There you find several Apple LCD profiles.
-For the iMac 2011 27" machine locate:

<key>F10Ta007</key>
<data>
ABEABgALABQAHAAnADMAPwBOAFwAZwBzAIEAkQClAL8A2wD/
</data>

-Change the <data> section to:
ABEAAgA3AF8AigCzAOsBJAFnAakB1AIJAlQCogL4A00DlgRpBGk=

-Drag your modded kext into Kext Utility, allow it correct permissions
-"Applebacklight.kext.bak" folder will be created
-Reboot

The above data pattern will allow for a wider span of steppings for the brightness control and utilizes more of the capacity of the HD3000. If you have a different machine, your panel ID can be found by going to System Preferences > Displays > Color > Open Profile > mmod

Caveats post-install/Bugs:
-16bit resolution glitch of UGA_DRAW_PROTOCOL - temporary solution: activate a sleep cycle and return, this should now clear the issue.

**UPDATE**
9-4-2020: please note the 870M_6GB_UGA.rom is experimental and in testing phases for those interested and have the card.
5-3-2021: I've removed 870M_Clevo_BR.rom because it is not functional and replaced it with GTX870M_V1.rom, appreciate @jimac2011 for testing.

"insanely great!"
-Steve Jobs

View attachment 940773 View attachment 940774

So my iMac with 880M functioned great for a few weeks. Today I got black screen all of a sudden mid work session. I did only word processing and internet browsing (no gaming or overly stressing the GPU). Any ideas what this could be? Any pointers would be appreciated. Thank you.

UPDATE: I successfully connected to screen sharing to the iMac, and there is NO trace of ANY GPU in System Information, confirming my suspicion that there is an issue with GPU. But what is the issue?

 

[Ausdauersportler]

So my iMac with 880M functioned great for a few weeks. Today I got black screen all of a sudden mid work session. I did only word processing and internet browsing (no gaming or overly stressing the GPU). Any ideas what this could be? Any pointers would be appreciated. Thank you.

UPDATE: I successfully connected to screen sharing to the iMac, and there is NO trace of ANY GPU in System Information, confirming my suspicion that there is an issue with GPU. But what is the issue?

Sorry, I would call it a dead GPU issue. Warning of the first post applies to those cards in retirement after a first life in gaming laptops. If you cannot resurrect the card with a reboot I will stick with this diagnosis.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

I just wanted to get rid of the Black screen on Catalina, thanks, however, i found the way thanks.

On both system you can used OCLP to run Catalina and Big Sur - get rid of the Patched Sur installation. It never had the patches included needed for our iMacs and it was never supported or even mentioned here to be used.

 

[herrdude]

Hello everyone, I am from China. I have a mid-2010 iMac, I want to install a wx4170,but I searched everywhere but couldn't find it. Whoever has a spare wx4170, I can buy it.

Fun fact: half of the users here are buying their cards from China. Usually, from Aliexpress and other similar companies.

EDIT: I was only making an observation. I cannot or will not say that these cards will actually work.

 

[KennyW]

Hello everyone, I am from China. I have a mid-2010 iMac, I want to install a wx4170,but I searched everywhere but couldn't find it. Whoever has a spare wx4170, I can buy it.

Yes, as herrdude said, many of us bought these GPUs from China via AliExpress or TaoBao.

You can see the Chinese character label on these cards.

Your best bet for an AMD card currently would be a WX4130. WX4150 also pops up every now & then.
Don't look down upon them as low end cards since they perform as good as the top end of the nVidia cards listed in first post in Big Sur.

 

[MrZupp]

Did you try it on another Mac to make sure it boots properly?

Yes

Can you verify the USB ports are working?
I've come across a few iMacs with dead ports.

I’ve used it before with 2 flashed cards ( k1100m and k3100m ) on big sur and every single one of the works, but I don’t know if it has preferences regarding the usb port when it boots into linux directly.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

About saving the firmware:

One can use the High Sierra (and later) eficheck utility to get the firmware (instead of Romtool which needs SIP to be disabled) by entering this line into a terminal app.

% sudo /usr/libexec/firmwarecheckers/eficheck/eficheck --save -b firmware.bin

Can please somebody load the firmware with both tools and compare the files by

% diff romtool.bin firmware.bin

If both files are not the same you will get a message like Binary files romtool.bin and firmware.bin differ.

 

[internetzel]

About saving the firmware:

One can use the High Sierra (and later) eficheck utility to get this firmware (instead of Romtool which needs SIP to be disabled) by entering this line into a terminal app.

% sudo /usr/libexec/firmwarecheckers/eficheck/eficheck --save -b firmware.bin

Can please somebody load the firmware with both tools and compare the files by

% diff romtool.bin firmware.bin

If both files are not the same you will get a message like Binary files romtool.bin and firmware.bin differ.

I compared one dump I had done using Romtool in August 2020 to the one done by eficheck now.
They differ in what appears to be the NVRAM content - I didn't expect to find the NVRAM contents in there. But I can clearly find the boot-args, my Wifi networks and so on in there. The differences are within what might be a section of 128 kB in size.
The rest is identical, as well as the total size.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

I compared one dump I had done using Romtool in August 2020 to the one done by eficheck now.
They differ in what appears to be the NVRAM content - I didn't expect to find the NVRAM contents in there. But I can clearly find the boot-args, my Wifi networks and so on in there. The differences are within what might be a section of 128 kB in size.
The rest is identical, as well as the total size.

There is another open —clean -b firmware.bin - possibly we have to start reading the man pages about the f******g details, again. Hate this

 

[internetzel]

There is another open —clean -b firmware.bin - possibly we have to start reading the man pages about the f******g details, again. Hate this

Yes, after running eficheck --clean on both the old and the new dump files results in them being identical. But I guess that dump won't contain the hardware serial numbers - so it won't be suitable for restoring the bootrom.

 

[Danykeit]

ALGUÉM PODE INDICAR UM VENDEDOR QUE VENDA A PLACA

Quadro K1100M JÁ CONFIGURADA PARA USO??​

 

[herrdude]

ALGUÉM PODE INDICAR UM VENDEDOR QUE VENDA A PLACA

Quadro K1100M JÁ CONFIGURADA PARA USO??​

Hello Danny, we don't speak Portuguese here. Your question should be in English.

I don't believe anyone is selling an already flashed K1100m. I will give you some advice, the most difficult part of the process is NOT flashing the video card. The most difficult part is tearing down the iMac and putting it back together. This you will have to do even if you buy a pre-flashed graphics card. Obrigado.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

After a long, long time I am using an NVIDIA card, again.

A short question:

Can anybody please tell me how to force or detect the famous color depth issue on boot?

 

[ChrisCaro]

After a long, long time I am using an NVIDIA card, again.

A short question:

Can anybody please tell me how to force or detect the famous color depth issue on boot?

What are you up to, ausdauersportler?

Detection is visual, look for stepped color grading in the blur on logon screen. If the blur is smooth, then the color depth issue does not exist. No way to force the color depth issue to happen, it occurs on each boot until you sleep and wake, whether you want to or not.

Or maybe I misunderstand your question?

 

[khronokernel]

Hello everyone, with OpenCore Legacy Patcher we're wanting to move away from the usage of AppleBacklightFixup to using WhateverGreen for all graphics related patching on NVIDIA GPUs.

The benifit this would have:

- Reduced kexts injected, allowing for less overall kernel memory usage
- Less kexts to potentially break boot in newer OSes
- Easier to debug as WEG's author is active

For this, we have a new branch on our Github and the below is a precompiled binary:

https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/suites/2729940947/artifacts/60249745

For most users, there should be zero difference. We'd greatly appreciate if users could test whether this is the case with their Nvidia-based iMacs, and report success or concerns

Note: If users receive a 404 on the above link, please verify you're signed into Github. It's an odd limitation of theirs regarding Github Action binaries

 

[Danykeit]

Olá Danny, não falamos português aqui. Sua pergunta deve ser em inglês.

Não acredito que alguém esteja vendendo um K1100m já com flash. Vou te dar alguns conselhos, a parte mais difícil do processo NÃO é piscar a placa de vídeo. A parte mais difícil é desmontar o iMac e montá-lo novamente. Você terá que fazer isso mesmo se comprar uma placa gráfica pré-flash. Obrigado.

Thank you very much and sorry, my friend! I also thank you for the tips.

I checked some ads on Aliexpress, and some sellers report that they sell the board with the updated Vbios to use directly. What do you think?

 

[ChrisCaro]

Thank you very much and sorry, my friend! I also thank you for the tips.

I checked some ads on Aliexpress, and some sellers report that they sell the board with the updated Vbios to use directly. What do you think?

If your going to buy a preflashed card I would ask what it was flashed with. Probably something from this very forum. I think some user in recent pages of this forum had success with preflashed cards.

Flashing yourself isn't hard either, some good step-by-step guides on YouTube and in the forum too.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Thank you very much and sorry, my friend! I also thank you for the tips.

I checked some ads on Aliexpress, and some sellers report that they sell the board with the updated Vbios to use directly. What do you think?

Preflashed is good, especially when you have only 1 iMac at hand.
But as it has been said before, flashing the Vbios is just the first step.
Issues may occur when you open your iMac to replace the GPU.
And normally, people who are comfortable with opening and working inside their iMac shouldn't feel uncomfortable about buying one card listed at post #1.
Bear in mind that there are no warranty for this DIY project.

 

[SteveC00ps]

Note the one I bought from Aliexpress said Mac version but it wasn't flashed with a Mac BIOS, well it wasn't even the card I chose either

 

[Ausdauersportler]

Note the one I bought from Aliexpress said Mac version but it wasn't flashed with a Mac BIOS, well it wasn't even the card I chose either

This was not the first incident of this type. Before we had sellers not really able to recognize the AMD cards correctly.

Some Ebay/AliExpress sellers (now) refuse to sell Dell or HP cards when not intended to use on the fitting Dell or HP models. They ask upfront and if you come back with Apple iMac you will not get one delivered. Just read the first post and decide on your own which one you would like to buy. Getting a working and long lasting used card is not easy. Read back the last few pages.

The more you ask and comment on these selling platforms about iMac compatible cards the higher the prices will go. We had this with all NVIDIA cards listed. Some are today more expensive than on the day NVIDIA announced it to the public nearly 10 years ago. All prices went up at least 100%. Sometimes even more like the famous 9 USD for a used K610M up to 150 USD for a flashed one on eBay U.K. today. This is insane!

Let us stick to our policy not to comment on particular sellers or sources in the public. This is not a market place for used graphics cards and the forum rules are pretty clear about this.