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iMac Late 2011? Upgrade / Help

G

GrantMCD

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 3, 2018
3
0
London
Hi guys,

Looking for a bit of Apple knowledge.

I recently bought a second hand iMac off of a friends friend to use instead of my dying out macbook pro 2012.

It came with 2TB hard drive and 4gb ram but with the use of Adobe Lightoom & Photoshop the struggles soon came around.

Anyhow I have just installed Timtec 2 x 8gb RAM DDR3 1333MHz & had to reboot the Mac and is currently running OS High Sierra. (It used to say it was a Late 2011 Mac but since have it back up and running and on High Sierra it now says Late 2009???)

I have a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB 2.5" SSD to go in very soon.

My issue now as I am looking at running Zwift on my mac and the graphics card really will not be able to handle it.









These are the bare minimum requirements for it to run on Mac

  • OS: Windows 7 x64 bit, OSX 10.8.
  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo.
  • Memory: 4GB.
  • Graphics: 1GB dedicated GPU, or embedded Intel HD 4000/AMD R5.
  • Hard Drive: 4GB of free space.
If anyone can help in terms of what to buy to upgrade my graphics card, even if it needs to be run externally.
 
The processor and graphics chip that you are showing are for a Late 2009, 27-inch iMac -- not a 2011

If you look at the serial number label on the bottom of your iMac stand, you will see that it is Model number A1312, and and EMC 2374 (a 2011 iMac will show EMC 2429 on that same label :cool: )
The OTHER way to tell is that a 2011 iMac will have 2 Thunderbolt ports. The ports have the little lightning bolt symbol, as in this article - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207443
Your 2009 iMac will have only one port that looks like that, and it will have a mini DisplayPort symbol, which is a symbol with a square shape, with vertical lines on both sides. It is NOT a Thunderbolt port.
The Radeon HD 4850 is already the upgrade graphics card for the 2009 iMac. The mini DisplayPort will support external displays, but not an external graphics solution of any kind. That would happen only with a Thunderbolt port. Even a 2011 iMac will not be able to use an external graphics card, as Thunderbolt 1 or 2 apparently do not allow that support in macOS 10.13.4
 
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