iM 4,1-14,4 2011 iMac Graphics Card Upgrade

[FlorisVN]

Hey all, sorry if I missed your PMs and I've not been around to reply here recently,
I've had some health problems and just quit my job, so it's been a fun month...

On the bright side, I recently made some significant progress on the iMac cards,
I was planning to release this update next week along with the Quadro roms,
but it seems DeeImac has just unknowingly let the cat out of the bag
(no worries Geoff, you weren't to know) so I may as well just tell you now...

I have found a way to get the bootscreen working without needing to do the bootrom mod!
It works for most Kepler cards (but sadly not the new AMD cards, so they'll still need the mod)

These Beta3 roms will enable the bootscreen without the bootrom mod, just flash the vBIOS in the normal way, if you've already done the bootrom mod these roms have no benefit. To be honest I am only releasing these now to avoid any more logic-board casualties - but you can call it an early Christmas preset.

In other news, I finally got native brightness control working on a few of the Kepler cards, but so far I have not been able to replicate this across most of the other cards. At the moment it seems most will still require either a new type of bootrom mod just to enable brightness control, alternatively you can use the OpenCore Boot-loader.

I'm still working on the brightness stuff, but I hope to have the beta Quadro roms ready soon.
After a lot of work I do have some cards working almost perfectly now, so I've decided that
for those who just want to pay for a simple plug & play solution I will be selling these on eBay.
For everyone else, I'm sure saint (?) Nick will make another delivery soon. 🎅

With that in mind, I would politely advise people against posting dumps from my eBay cards.
It's probably best to wait for the goose to finish laying golden eggs, before you eat it for Christmas...

Thx so much, for all this hard work, and sharing with the iMac community !!
No more bootrom patch required on these Nvidia cards is awesome !!

So brightness control is working on these kepler cards.. ? (765/770/780)

This is indeed an early xmas, and I wish you all the best !!

 

[Kouiderdream]

you cannot just do both dying light and ir on the same connector, but I think you can just strip off the ports from a cheap usb 2 hub (this one looks fine I guess) and essentially plug the ir board and dying light into the hub with 2 extra ports for whatever future things can be done internally. Should be as simple as this: View attachment 878745
Not sure why IR would be desirable enough to go through the work though.


Catalina patcher has an option to patch the installer app itself, the update from there is basically the same as if you were to update from settings, just make sure you don't install the legacy graphics patch if you upgraded the gpu. But yes you need to use the patcher.
[automerge]1574477593[/automerge]

This sorta shows how to physically set up the programmer (ignore the software stuff, just use it for setup) Important thing is that the red wire on the clip is pin 1, pin 1 on the chip is marked with a dot
This video I used shows how to set up and use the software on a Mac as well as show how to make a backup, flashing is basically the same, follow what the help command says. Keep in mind that by default all files are saved to and pulled from your home folder.

Hi
Thanks for this link now i see methode with Linux it can be an alternative for me because like the first video i am still blocked due to ask of password i posted lot of questions here but the answers are not so quick
I will try this afternoon already one week oassed abd my 2 imac are still open

 

[Dilli]

Hey all, sorry if I missed your PMs and I've not been around to reply here recently,
I've had some health problems and just quit my job, so it's been a fun month...

On the bright side, I recently made some significant progress on the iMac cards,
I was planning to release this update next week along with the Quadro roms,
but it seems DeeImac has just unknowingly let the cat out of the bag
(no worries Geoff, you weren't to know) so I may as well just tell you now...

I have found a way to get the bootscreen working without needing to do the bootrom mod!
It works for most Kepler cards (but sadly not the new AMD cards, so they'll still need the mod)

These Beta3 roms will enable the bootscreen without the bootrom mod, just flash the vBIOS in the normal way, if you've already done the bootrom mod these roms have no benefit. To be honest I am only releasing these now to avoid any more logic-board casualties - but you can call it an early Christmas preset.

In other news, I finally got native brightness control working on a few of the Kepler cards, but so far I have not been able to replicate this across most of the other cards. At the moment it seems most will still require either a new type of bootrom mod just to enable brightness control, alternatively you can use the OpenCore Boot-loader.

I'm still working on the brightness stuff, but I hope to have the beta Quadro roms ready soon.
After a lot of work I do have some cards working almost perfectly now, so I've decided that
for those who just want to pay for a simple plug & play solution I will be selling these on eBay.
For everyone else, I'm sure saint (?) Nick will make another delivery soon. 🎅

With that in mind, I would politely advise people against posting dumps from my eBay cards.
It's probably best to wait for the goose to finish laying golden eggs, before you eat it for Christmas...

Thanks Nick for your wonderful efforts and helping this unsupported card community. Please do provide the link to the Ebay. Surely would like the plug & play method.

 

[LegoNickD]

Hi
Thanks for this link now i see methode with Linux it can be an alternative for me because like the first video i am still blocked due to ask of password i posted lot of questions here but the answers are not so quick
I will try this afternoon already one week oassed abd my 2 imac are still open

You just type your admin password (probably the same as the one you login with) and then press enter. No characters actually show for it because it's a password. If you don't know your password then you might need to use a different computer or at least install macOS again.

 

[NOTNlCE]

Just as I am about to pack up the test bed more awesome news is released. Thanks as always, @Nick [D]vB - I've updated the Wiki post to reflect the fantastic news!

 

[Kouiderdream]

Thanks Nik for the great job i was blocked at the flashing of th rom now it will be easy fir me i try this night and give feedback

 

[makaveliz]

Hello to all. I have the same problem of many people: imac 27" 2011 and graphic card out. About 5 years ago it was change with a new one by apple store. I read a lot about this problem but I didn't find an easy solution and now I have more confusion So, is there an easy solution to replace my 6970m? I read about k1100, k2000, maybe k3000, 765,770,780,860,880, maybe 980 and 680. I'd like to chance my card with the same or better performance, no problem with the temperature, and not too many proceedings ti adapt the graphic card. I know, I ask too much, but thank in advance to who help me.

 

[FlorisVN]

Hello to all. I have the same problem of many people: imac 27" 2011 and graphic card out. About 5 years ago it was change with a new one by apple store. I read a lot about this problem but I didn't find an easy solution and now I have more confusion So, is there an easy solution to replace my 6970m? I read about k1100, k2000, maybe k3000, 765,770,780,860,880, maybe 980 and 680. I'd like to chance my card with the same or better performance, no problem with the temperature, and not too many proceedings ti adapt the graphic card. I know, I ask too much, but thank in advance to who help me.

easiest route for you, will be nvidia GTX765/770/780M card.
Recently Nick posted vbios beta 3 here, which only requires you to change the vbios of the card, in order to get an EFI bootscreen !

bootrom patch no longer needed..

Make sure you have the 3 pipe heatsink, which is highly reccomended !
Also have some K5 special thermal pasta, a dremmel and thermal paste by hand..

Your iMac will live again, better than ever, and if you do the optional EFI bootscreen mod, you also have a bootscreen thx to Nick !

 

[Kouiderdream]

easiest route for you, will be nvidia GTX765/770/780M card.
Recently Nick posted vbios beta 3 here, which only requires you to change the vbios of the card, in order to get an EFI bootscreen !

bootrom patch no longer needed..

Make sure you have the 3 pipe heatsink, which is highly reccomended !
Also have some K5 special thermal pasta, a dremmel and thermal paste by hand..

Your iMac will live again, better than ever, and if you do the optional EFI bootscreen mod, you also have a bootscreen thx to Nick !

Hi

easiest route for you, will be nvidia GTX765/770/780M card.
Recently Nick posted vbios beta 3 here, which only requires you to change the vbios of the card, in order to get an EFI bootscreen !

bootrom patch no longer needed..

Make sure you have the 3 pipe heatsink, which is highly reccomended !
Also have some K5 special thermal pasta, a dremmel and thermal paste by hand..

Your iMac will live again, better than ever, and if you do the optional EFI bootscreen mod, you also have a bootscreen thx to Nick !

Hi
I confirm it work just installed catalina
No issue, thanks Nik for the good Job
I wish you happy new year with more succès 👍

 

[makaveliz]

easiest route for you, will be nvidia GTX765/770/780M card.
Recently Nick posted vbios beta 3 here, which only requires you to change the vbios of the card, in order to get an EFI bootscreen !

bootrom patch no longer needed..

Make sure you have the 3 pipe heatsink, which is highly reccomended !
Also have some K5 special thermal pasta, a dremmel and thermal paste by hand..

Your iMac will live again, better than ever, and if you do the optional EFI bootscreen mod, you also have a bootscreen thx to Nick !

First of all thank you for answer me and to the community for help newbie

I found it for example:

Dell Alienware M17x R5 17 / 18 GTX 770M 3GB Video Card

• Model: NVidia GeForce GTX 770M
• X-Bracket is NOT INCLUDED
• Please be aware of that Dell Alienware 17 R1 is NOT SAME as Dell Alienware M17x R1. Please be aware of that Dell Alienware 18 R1 is NOT SAME as Dell Alienware M18x R1.

and there are 4 alternative:
1) m17 xr5
2)17 r1
3)18 r1
4) m18x r3 vikings

what of those must I choose?

No 3 pipeline include. Do I need it?

dremel??

 

[rtowner75]

Hello Everyone!

First off, just want to say Thanks for this awesome community and for everyone's hard work on this topic!

Following instructions found here, I have successfully swapped out a bad GPU on my 27" 2011 iMac with a "new to me" Dell AMD Radeon Pro WX7100 8GB card with the DyingLight module. Everything is working great so far and I am ready to take the next step to install Catalina following Dosdude1's tutorial.

Unfortunately, this is proving to be a bit difficult not having a boot screen to be able to see the boot menu.

Any Recommendations?

Thanks in advance!!

Robert

 

[jborko]

Any Recommendations?

Look here.

 

[quarkysg]

These Beta3 roms will enable the bootscreen without the bootrom mod, just flash the vBIOS in the normal way, if you've already done the bootrom mod these roms have no benefit. To be honest I am only releasing these now to avoid any more logic-board casualties - but you can call it an early Christmas preset.

@Nick [D]vB , firstly a big THANK YOU for your work on the GPU's vBIOS! I flashed beta3 to my mid 2010 27" iMac with the GTX765M GPU and now I have EFI boot screen selection without any boot rom mod! Great work!

I noticed one minor issue at the moment tho. It appears that the vBIOS added the LCD display as an output sound source to macOS. I guess that's due to you trying to get display brightness working. I'm currently running Mojave 10.14.6 on my iMac. I've attached a screen shot of the Sound control panel from my iMac.

I still have sound on my iMac, so all is good at my end.

Again, great work! Very much appreciated!

Thanks.
[automerge]1574635598[/automerge]

So brightness control is working on these kepler cards.. ? (765/770/780)

Still not enabled on my iMac.

 

[rtowner75]

Look here.

Thank You! I'll take a look at this.

 

[hijglander]

Thx so much, for all this hard work, and sharing with the iMac community !!
No more bootrom patch required on these Nvidia cards is awesome !!

So brightness control is working on these kepler cards.. ? (765/770/780)

This is indeed an early xmas, and I wish you all the best !!

On the 780 I have no brightness control present. @Nick [D]vB Mate, thanks for the Beta3 vbios bootscreens are available, finally found the issue with my OSX install.. as it appears a disk error (had to restore a snapshot) screwed things around and stopped OSX from loading.

 

[LegoNickD]

Sorry this is off topic but I'm trying to make a quick and dirty patch that just replaces "core i3" with "Xeon" in about this Mac and I am completely blanking on how to overwrite permissions on a system file. Nothing I've tried on google has worked and last time I did something like that was 2 years ago. Anyone know how to do this? chflags nouchg doesn't seem to make a difference.

 

[kmare]

thanks @Nick [D]vB - working with GX780M beta 3 . Had hell of time disabling SIP in order to boot windows, but finally figured out!

Disable SIP (non bootscreen GPU - Blind)
This never worked for me -- but for 10.13.6 the keystrokes are as follows

1. command - R (boot recovery
2. wait 5 minutes
3. 4 x enter (select english language)
4. wait 30 seconds
5. fn-ctrl-F2 (select menu)
6. 4 x right arrow
7. 4 x down arrow
8. enter
9. wait 10 seconds
10. "csrutil disable"
11. "reboot"
12. open terminal
13. "csrutil status" to confirm

Disable SIP (non bootscreen GPU reboot method)
not sure why this works, but i guess booting into OSX normally initialized the GPU - which let me see recovery mode.

1. boot into OSX normally
2. open terminal
3. "sudo nvram recovery-boot-mode=unused"
4. "sudo reboot recovyer" -- yes spelled to wrong, just for certainty
5. watch recovery boot, select language, open terminal
6. "csrutil disable"
7. "reboot" should boot back into normal
8. open terminal
9. "csrutil status" to confirm

anyone replicate second way?


Unigine Valley Benchmark 1.0

FPS:	43.1
Score:	1803
Min FPS:	21.3
Max FPS:	87.9

System

Platform:	Darwin 17.7.0 x86_64
CPU model:	Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (3392MHz) x8
GPU model:	GeForce GTX 780M by Nick[D]vB (256MB) x1

Settings

Render:	OpenGL
Mode:	2560x1440 fullscreen
Preset	Custom
Quality	Medium

 

[highvoltage12v]

Sorry this is off topic but I'm trying to make a quick and dirty patch that just replaces "core i3" with "Xeon" in about this Mac and I am completely blanking on how to overwrite permissions on a system file. Nothing I've tried on google has worked and last time I did something like that was 2 years ago. Anyone know how to do this? chflags nouchg doesn't seem to make a difference.
View attachment 879091

I'm assuming this is Catalina based on the wallpaper. If so you have to unlock the system partition to write to it. I use Hackintool to mount the system partition to write to it. You can see this in my hd3000 Kext modification post, link on page 1.

Also I like to add my username to the directory by clicking '+' and adding my username changing the privilege to Read & Write then clicking the gear and click apply to enclosed files.

 

[guest00x]

Can someone give insight what of my problem? My imac 2011 with 770m Beta3 no POST with lcd plugged in AND if unplugged it boots to HS but NO usb at (no power or something, keyboard and mouse does not work or bluetooth) working external monitor and remote access. imac bootrom at lastest, tried the flashed 770m on known working imac 2011 but gives same issues. i want to get some info before i open and flash again. thank you.

 

[highvoltage12v]

Can someone give insight what of my problem? My imac 2011 with 770m Beta3 no POST with lcd plugged in AND if unplugged it boots to HS but NO usb at (no power or something, keyboard and mouse does not work or bluetooth) working external monitor and remote access. imac bootrom at lastest, tried the flashed 770m on known working imac 2011 but gives same issues. i want to get some info before i open and flash again. thank you.

Well I'm about to try my 770m with Beta3 on my 27" iMac Tommorow. I will let you know of any USB issues. Strange that it happens on both iMacs with the same card. I don't think there are that many 770m owners on this thread. Most are 780m and 765m.

 

[Kouiderdream]

Can someone give insight what of my problem? My imac 2011 with 770m Beta3 no POST with lcd plugged in AND if unplugged it boots to HS but NO usb at (no power or something, keyboard and mouse does not work or bluetooth) working external monitor and remote access. imac bootrom at lastest, tried the flashed 770m on known working imac 2011 but gives same issues. i want to get some info before i open and flash again. thank you.

Hi
I buy this one and worked fine at first i flashed it eith dell vbios from techpowerup worked (without boot screen) and now flashed with vbios from Nik (beta3) and have boot screen

 

[jborko]

Hi
I buy this one and worked fine at first i flashed it eith dell vbios from techpowerup worked (without boot screen) and now flashed with vbios from Nik (beta3) and have boot screen

Congratulations! Can you run a Valley benchmark and share the results with this vbios, please? I am not too happy with the 765M which I installed as a fallback plan when I ended up with non-working 780M.

 

[Terrapater]

Hi
first of all thank you Nick for a splendid job. Flashed your new 765rom and I have a bootscreen without doing the bootrom hack. BUT I also have a weird behavior of my machine, an iMac 11.3 mid 2010 27" (Core i/, 2.93 Ghz). It just boots if I make a NVRAM reset on every startup or if I push the Alt button and get to the boot screen menu. Otherwise it stays black. And so I cannot get rid of the legacy video card patch from Catalina patcher. When I run the post install it does not boot again if I do not make a reset and push the alt button. And when it boots then I still have the patch on it. Any ideas what might be wrong? Thanx for any advice!

 

[FlorisVN]

Hi
first of all thank you Nick for a splendid job. Flashed your new 765rom and I have a bootscreen without doing the bootrom hack. BUT I also have a weird behavior of my machine, an iMac 11.3 mid 2010 27" (Core i/, 2.93 Ghz). It just boots if I make a NVRAM reset on every startup or if I push the Alt button and get to the boot screen menu. Otherwise it stays black. And so I cannot get rid of the legacy video card patch from Catalina patcher. When I run the post install it does not boot again if I do not make a reset and push the alt button. And when it boots then I still have the patch on it. Any ideas what might be wrong? Thanx for any advice!

This is still a known bug as far as I know.
There is a delay when the EFI bootscreen is shown..
when you start your Mac with ALT for example, it needs a few seconds to display the EFI bootscreen.
This "bug" could perhaps be fixed someday, who knows..

When your iMac is using an SSD for example, the system boots quick enough to skip the entire EFI bootscreen. Since it is faster than the EFI bootscreen delay time "bug".

To remove the legacy video patcher, you have to reinstall MacOS.
As far as I know and have experienced my self, only 2011 iMac's have the Legacy video patcher disabled by default for the Catalina Patcher.
I think for 2009/2010 iMac's you need to modify the Catalina patcher, or there is some way of removing the legacy video patcher by this point I dont know..
With Mojave patcher you had the option to deselect the Legacy video patcher, but now since Catalina patcher is fully automated, I dont know exactly how to change/fix this atm.
I think this question was discussed here before on this big thread, not sure..

perhaps @dosdude1 can help us here.. ?

 

[kmare]

Congratulations! Can you run a Valley benchmark and share the results with this vbios, please? I am not too happy with the 765M which I installed as a fallback plan when I ended up with non-working 780M.

updated my post - let me know if that works.

Soooo. Who is going to try opencore to get brightness working?