5K iMac (Late 2015) - suggestions?

[mlayer]

I picked up an old 5K iMac a few weeks ago. The screen and the machine were in excellent shape, though over time I found the fan was rattling and annoying me to no end. I figured I would set aside some time to open the machine up and make some changes. So far I have:

1. Changed the fan (now quiet and smooth, $18)
2. Swapped the 1 TB hard drive for a 512 GB SATA SSD ($33)
3. Added 16 GB of RAM for a total of 32 GB (used, $17)

The 24/32 GB SSD remains as sort of a vestigial tail from the Fusion drive, not terribly useful but still exists as storage. The old hard drive will end up in an enclosure at some point. For now I sealed the iMac up with packing tape instead of the screen adhesive in case I want to change the SSD or CPU. I was surprised that the insides weren't as dusty as I expected. The fan did a good job of acting as a filter, which led to its demise I guess.

Is it worth doing anything else with this iMac? I only use it with my main machine, a M2 MacBook Air, for Universal Control. Basically it's acting as a nice monitor. The iMac handles multiple streams of video with no problem, and while I'm comfortable using OCLP I haven't gotten the itch yet to upgrade this from Monterey to Sonoma or Sequoia.

 

[Guenter]

I would not glue the screen in case you want to convert the imac to a screen one day.
Cpu upgrade to i7 is usually expensive if you dont have a good source.
For basic tasks an ssd attached to usb3 is fine.
For demanding tasks think about an m4 mini and convert the imac to a very good 5k screen.

 

[mlayer]

I've seen some of the 5K conversion videos and the idea is intriguing. I don't think I'll do it until the Mac inside is too slow and can't run any current software anymore. It still runs current Chrome and numerous apps so I'm fine for now. Until I cross that bridge this iMac with these modest upgrades should do for a few years. I kinda like the idea of the iMac being a pretty, dumb terminal. I'm not asking it to *do* much.

Yesterday on a whim I connected my 4K Samsung monitor to the 5K iMac using a Thunderbolt-DisplayPort cable that I had lying around. The support was plug-n-play flawless. Now through Universal Control I can utilize 4 screens: M2 MacBook Air, 5K iMac, 4K display, and an iPad Pro via Sidecar/Universal Control, all arranged through Sequoia's display handling. I can't ask for much more. The next step of Apple's Continuity may be the ability throw windows from one machine to the next, but I won't get my hopes up. AirDrop and cut-n-paste work just fine.