I've put too much into this iMac, but honestly it's more of a hobby now more than anything. I bought a 2011 iMac 27" 2.7Ghz i5 for $600 last year, and upgraded it as follows:
I'll upload the photos I took showing how easy it is - but you NEED thermal pads and the correct, 3-pipe heatsink to make this work. The 2 pipe is NOT correct - you can see in one of the pics below that the 3-pipe has much larger pipes, and the cooling zone matches the various chips on the PCB.
I took 99% alcohol and a toothbrush to clean all the old thermal paste off the 6970M first, before applying new thermal paste. Don't go nuts with the new paste - 1/4" on the die should be plenty.
Be sure to remove the protective film on the pads before applying, and apply thermal paste (I use Arctic Silver 5) with a baggie / saran wrap wrapped around your finger to smooth out. It's a pretty easy process once you get the logic board out.
I opened Portal 2 at max settings and played it for a few minutes. GPU temp got up to 165 F (apparently it's rated for 200 F) but everything worked great, and it cooled down rapidly. I do notice the 6970M is a fair bit smoother than the 6770M at full resolution - it does offer twice the bandwidth and 4x the RAM after all. Too bad there's no Metal on it.
UPDATE: Frickin' thing suffered damage after a power surge in my office building. Welp, it's back to the 6770M again.
- Core i7-2600S 2.8Ghz - $150
- 2x Samsung 500GB 850 EVO SSDs - $140 each (SATA3 RAID0)
- 1x PNY 240GB SSD for the SuperDrive bay - $60
- 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3L-1600 RAM (runs at 1333) - $85
- 6970M 2GB card - $240
- 6970 3-pipe heatsink - $35
I'll upload the photos I took showing how easy it is - but you NEED thermal pads and the correct, 3-pipe heatsink to make this work. The 2 pipe is NOT correct - you can see in one of the pics below that the 3-pipe has much larger pipes, and the cooling zone matches the various chips on the PCB.
I took 99% alcohol and a toothbrush to clean all the old thermal paste off the 6970M first, before applying new thermal paste. Don't go nuts with the new paste - 1/4" on the die should be plenty.
Be sure to remove the protective film on the pads before applying, and apply thermal paste (I use Arctic Silver 5) with a baggie / saran wrap wrapped around your finger to smooth out. It's a pretty easy process once you get the logic board out.
I opened Portal 2 at max settings and played it for a few minutes. GPU temp got up to 165 F (apparently it's rated for 200 F) but everything worked great, and it cooled down rapidly. I do notice the 6970M is a fair bit smoother than the 6770M at full resolution - it does offer twice the bandwidth and 4x the RAM after all. Too bad there's no Metal on it.
UPDATE: Frickin' thing suffered damage after a power surge in my office building. Welp, it's back to the 6770M again.
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