Mid 2010 imac GPU upgrade

[cabin4me]

First off let me say thank you for allowing me to become a part of these forums.

To start off I want to say that I am pretty close to lost when it comes to Apple products. I have been a standard PC man myself for years. My experience with computers goes back to the days of the old 386 machines but these Apple products are a bit confusing for me.

I own several older iMac desktops that I am working on. One is a mid-2010 core I3 that is missing the graphics card. I am going to upgrade this thing as much as I can to bring it as close to today's machines as I can. I want to ask someone with much more Apple experience than me if I can use an older Nvidia GeForce 460M card with the 2010 iMac's logic board. I looked at it and it seems to fit but I know fitting a slot doesn't always mean it will work. The card is from an old Asus gaming computer I owned and ended up getting rid of.
It seems the mid-2010 iMacs came with an AMD card but I am not really sure since mine is missing. Google told me to give them a break from all the searches I have done trying to find the answer to this problem. (just a joke-google stopped talking to me years ago). Anyway, I would greatly appreciate any help or direction to some help with my problem.

Wishing you all a very blessed day.
John

 

[velocityg4]

Not sure about the 460m. But I don't think any GeForce 400 or 500 series will work due to a lack of drivers. You'll also want to pay attention to card choices for OS compatibility. As a lot of cards which do work. May not work with Mojave or Catalina. If you decided to use the DosDude1 patch to run those OSes.

The iMac uses an MXM slot and a lot of cards do work. Although PC cards need a VBIOS patch for a boot screen. There are a fair number of card upgrades people do on this range of iMac's which had the MXM slot. You can also grab GPU from other iMacs. Although some of the higher end cards may have heat issues or power issues. Since the 21.5 doesn't have the same level of cooling or PSU wattage as the 27.

iMac 2009 to 2011 (A1311/A1312) Upgrade Guide – MacintoshMen

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2011 iMac Graphics Card Upgrade

iMac 2009 to 2011 MXM3 graphics card upgrade (Lastest update 10/13/2023 - this is the official documentation page - you found it finally!) This is the single and only documentation post. During the last years we constantly updated this post to reflect the lastet development of vBIOS and OCLP...

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You can also upgrade the CPU. Although there seems to be a limit where the 95W won't work. However, the 82W i7-870s seems to work. At least according to the user David Zabran.

SOLVED: Upgrading CPU from i3 3.06 Ghz to i5/i7-S version 82W - iMac Intel 21.5" EMC 2389

Apple has used so many different CPU's in their systems I doubt anyone has a listing what works in which logic board. A better way to do this is to get down to your CPU in your system and make note of the part numbers, then go to Intel's web site and look it up. Once you know the CPU series...

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