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2011 IMAC Which OS is best

Garyed055

Garyed055

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 15, 2018
232
107
Canton Georgia
Hi all

Recently purchased a 2011 IMAC with 4gig ram 2.5Ghz I5 quad core CPU. Its running pretty good with High Sierra but till more memory is added would better performance come from an earlier OS?

Gary
 
Yes, but you would have to drop -way- back to Yosemite or even Mavericks to see a major difference in memory usage.

I'd suggest staying with High Sierra and expediting the memory upgrade.
 
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padams35 said:
Yes, but you would have to drop -way- back to Yosemite or even Mavericks to see a major difference in memory usage.

I'd suggest staying with High Sierra and expediting the memory upgrade.
Click to expand...


Thanks Everyone Ordering the extra memory now. Just out if curiosity what is the reason Apple says the 2011 can't Run Mojave?

Gary
 
Garyed055 said:
Thanks Everyone Ordering the extra memory now. Just out if curiosity what is the reason Apple says the 2011 can't Run Mojave?

Gary
Click to expand...
Apple wants you to buy a new computer.

I still am using the same iMac as yours. But I added 4 GB RAM. It is much faster when booting up, shutting down, and opening apps.
I had added two 4GB ram cards but one turned out to be defective. So I currently have 8 GB but it is still much faster than before.
I considered SSD upgrade also but after seeing the improvement with only RAM upgrade, I won't get SSD.
 
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edhchoe said:
Apple wants you to buy a new computer.

I still am using the same iMac as yours. But I added 4 GB RAM. It is much faster when booting up, shutting down, and opening apps.
I had added two 4GB ram cards but one turned out to be defective. So I currently have 8 GB but it is still much faster than before.
I considered SSD upgrade also but after seeing the improvement with only RAM upgrade, I won't get SSD.
Click to expand...


if I understand correctly you have 3 memory slots occupied? You don't have to add them 2 at time?

Gary
 
Hello. If its a Mid-2011 iMac 27", our best advise to you is to install macsfancontrol and turn the brightness down on the display to the halfway mark. monitor the heat generated with the macsfancontrol and adjust the fans when doing intensive work like any video or photo editing. It may help prolong the life of that machine. Otherwise you may be looking at a GPU or logic board failure sooner than you'd like. Which can be fixed, but it will take money to do that.

We ran High Sierra on that model with 32GB of RAM and an SSD for a year and it was smooth. Before that I believe it was El Capitan and even before that Snow Leopard. We skipped Sierra. Snow Leopard was the fastest OS, but eventually it became too cumbersome to find workarounds for software installs. Good luck.
 
Garyed055 said:
Thanks Everyone Ordering the extra memory now. Just out if curiosity what is the reason Apple says the 2011 can't Run Mojave?

Gary
Click to expand...

The 6xxM GPUs don't support the new Metal API, which the Mojave operating system apparently now exclusively uses.
 
Garyed055 said:
Just out if curiosity what is the reason Apple says the 2011 can't Run Mojave?
Click to expand...
It's possible. There's a hack and a patch. I've done it. Avoid!

padams35 said:
The 6xxM GPUs don't support the new Metal API, which the Mojave operating system apparently now exclusively uses.
Click to expand...
That makes it sound like someone's arbitrary decision. It's not.

The problem is that the GPU in your 2011 (and mine and my 2010) does not support graphics acceleration under Mojave and there is no workaround. As the guy who wrote the patch says, "Mojave on these Macs is useless." DosDude1 is absolutely right.

I have Mojave on a test SSD and can boot mine via eSATA. Be prepared to erase the SSD and do a Time Machine Restore after you see the results.

There are a couple pf other threads where people are trying to find compatible GPUs and the routines that will work. Still looking.
 
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Update

Friday of this week I turned the Imac on and after 10 minutes I heard the loudest popping noise I ever heard anything make. quickly I turned it off and called the people I bought it from. They said send it back to them and they will replace it. So for now I'm back to my 2007 Mac Mini till the new unit arrives

Gary
 
Garyed055 said:
Update

Friday of this week I turned the Imac on and after 10 minutes I heard the loudest popping noise I ever heard anything make. quickly I turned it off and called the people I bought it from. They said send it back to them and they will replace it. So for now I'm back to my 2007 Mac Mini till the new unit arrives

Gary
Click to expand...

Where did you buy the used/refurbished iMac from?
 
I'm currently at 10.11 El Capitan with OS installed on SSD, plus a 3Tb hard drive . Should I upgrade to Sierra(10.12) or High Sierra? I've heard that there are compatibility issue of AHFS for spinning drives.

What are advantages of upgrading it to 10.12 or 10.13? Or disadvantages (like app compatibility?)

Many thanks in advance!
 
Running High Sierra on SSDs in my 2010 and 2011 27” iMacs. Works great.

There is no point to APFS on an HDD. The High Sierra installer will not attempt to format it that way. If installing on an internal SSD, it will format APFS.
 
edhchoe said:
I considered SSD upgrade also but after seeing the improvement with only RAM upgrade, I won't get SSD.
Click to expand...


You might want to reconsider the SSD. I added one to my iMac and the difference in speed was exponential.
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mikehalloran said:
Running High Sierra on SSDs in my 2010 and 2011 27” iMacs. Works great.

There is no point to APFS on an HDD. The High Sierra installer will not attempt to format it that way. If installing on an internal SSD, it will format APFS.
Click to expand...


Seconded for running High Sierra with an SSD. I have no idea how it will run on just an HDD, though, but I suspect it might not be so bueno. HS runs just fine on my mid-2010 iMac, which I upgraded to a fusion drive a few years back (see sig. for specs).
 
Garyed055 said:
This is so different The imac that failed the day it arrived after 10 minutes of use the fans were running full blast and loud. The replacement even after watching an hour of video on Itunes no fan noise at all

Gary
Click to expand...

what are yout temperatures saying .. ?
post a screenshot here from macsfancontrol program.

2011 imac's are known to get very hot AMD GPU's !!
 
Screen Shot 2018-11-29 at 9.19.39 PM.png
FlorisVN said:
what are yout temperatures saying .. ?
post a screenshot here from macsfancontrol program.

2011 imac's are known to get very hot AMD GPU's !!
Click to expand...

Here it is

Gary
 
these iddle temps. look fine to me.

post them new temp. screenshot, after watching a movie for example or doing something intensive with your mac..
 
Watching an h.264 video shouldn’t stress such a Mac much, assuming your software is doing proper hardware h.264 acceleration. If your software isn’t doing proper hardware h.264 decode acceleration then it’s time for new software. You’re out of luck though if it is h.265 HEVC video, since these machines do not support hardware h.265 acceleration.

Anyhow, I recommend High Sierra on these machines. You just need SSD Plus 8 GB RAM. Don’t waste your time with trying to hack Mojave to work on these machines. Total waste of time.
 
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