So I bought and modded the GPU card on my 27” 2011 iMac i5 and noticed that the GPU heatsink had only two copper heat pipes. I wanted to get a k5100m for my iMac but those require a three pipe heat sink. Which mid 2011 iMacs came with those? Was it exclusive to the AMD 6970 equipped machines with the 2GB of memory? Saw a local machine pop up with a 6970 GPU but I didn’t buy it for fear of it having a two pipe heat sink like my other machine.
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27” iMac 2011 which ones have three pipe GPU heat sinks?
- Thread starter stevescivic
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Yeah definitely. The card is very big.
But that's the same size as the stock card. Likely it has more VRAM and heat-generating components.
Then you can always buy only the heatsink, not the whole iMac for just the heatsink. I bought mine for 36$ on Aliexpress (including shipping from China)
Well there is a local guy selling a 2011 iMac i7 with the 6970 graphics but with 1GB of video memory but I can’t ask them to open it up to to look at the heat sink. I should’ve waited to buy this machine that is listed locally instead of the one I picked up at the start of October. It is better in that it has a better graphics card and cpu and SSD vs mine I had to add everything in after the fact. Oh well... I could always sell my 2011 and buy the next unit to remod the graphics although I am not sure if it’s really worth it given how old the computer is. K5100m cards for example are easily $400+ and they only offer a 200% increase in speed which isn’t fast considering a 2015 iMac would destroy in the graphics department.