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Imac 21.5 2011 & Opencore.. Worth it?
- Thread starter neosho
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Honestly, it’s alright. I run opencore Big Sur on my 2010 27” iMac, and aside from some graphical weirdness with the colors in transparent window bits, it runs solidly enough. I’d make sure that you have plenty of RAM and an SSD in there (your machine is easy enough to upgrade and can take up to 32GB of RAM) first. And be aware that, with any patch like this, you should always have backups in place in case it doesn’t work out for you or something goes wrong 
If you upgrade the GPU to a metal supported one, and then upgrade to a recent OS (like Big Sur etc.) then it is worth it 100%. It revives the iMac and you can keep using it without any problem for basic tasks for many years to come.
I know this is an old post, but for anyone browsing this in the future, YES, it's worth doing the OpenCore. I'm running Monterey on a 2011 iMac with quad core i5 that I upgraded to 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD. It runs flawlessly and the OpenCore resolves the "Metal" incompatibility. No need to upgrade the video card, it works fine.
OpenCore now supports Ventura, but since that OS is only 4 months old I'm in no hurry to upgrade.
The photo below is lousy but you "get the picture".
OpenCore now supports Ventura, but since that OS is only 4 months old I'm in no hurry to upgrade.
The photo below is lousy but you "get the picture".
I have been thinking of using OCLP on my mid 2010 21.5 iMac since I recently upgraded to a SSD HD. Nice to see that it works well on a older iMac.
I am on 10.13.6. What MacOS did you upgrade from?
I did a fresh install, which is typically recommended. I use iCloud to store my files.
OpenCore will work using an upgrade, but you still need to boot from USB because you cannot run the upgrade while running the operating system (I've tried). After booting from USB (hold down "option" while booting) and selecting the installer you simply need to click on the existing "Macintosh HD" or whatever the name of your boot drive is.