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

[mikrob74]

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...

Hello,

Recently installed a 860m and could only boot Ubuntu until I flashed to recommended rom and noticed that the Ubuntu 19.10 and 18 allowed brightness control with original or new rom file until I added Nvidia kexts. Would it be possible to use the Linux base driver in Mac 10.13 to get brightness control back? also have you had any luck with a modified boot rom file for the 860m possibly?

 

[=TheONE=]

Hi guys! I have a little problem. My iMac does not respond to power saving adjustments. Goes to sleep only by hand. Automatically only power off the screen, but does not fall asleep. Sleep repair kexts installed. What can be done?

 

[Pascal Baillargeau]

Hi guys! I have a little problem. My iMac does not respond to power saving adjustments. Goes to sleep only by hand. Automatically only power off the screen, but does not fall asleep. Sleep repair kexts installed. What can be done?
View attachment 906148

"pmset -g assertions" in terminal to see what is blocking sleep.

 

[=TheONE=]

What blocks sleep?

 

[atomizasser]

Hi.
i have read some post about use of opencore but i have some doubts.
i have an imac 2010 with gtx 765 with modded vbios. I have installed Catalina 10.15.4 and all is working great. In this imac, if i install opencore, would i get some advantage?
thanks

 

[herrdude]

Hi.
i have read some post about use of opencore but i have some doubts.
i have an imac 2010 with gtx 765 with modded vbios. I have installed Catalina 10.15.4 and all is working great. In this imac, if i install opencore, would i get some advantage?
thanks

You can find all the information here: #4,921

Cheers!

 

[atomizasser]

You can find all the information here: #4,921

Cheers!

thanks. I had read this post.
my question was oriented into things that has been discovered recently. Like TDM on gtx. Im interested in this feature but after read some post i‘ve some doubts how activate it in my mac. Is it possible with catalina? need i to install high sierra with open-core? Is it possible double boot in same hd and activate TDM with non apple keyboard?
thanks

 

[Aesthetica]

Might have found a nice 770m - any reason why this wouldn't work now that Alienware / Dell isn't the only recommendation? It says its for MSI / Clevo.

Thanks

 

[mmb4]

Hi guys,

Lots of nice things going on right here! Thanks for all the information.
I was reading this thread, got to page 80 (many hours later) and didn’t find answer to my problem.
I have a late 2011 iMac doing great service for about 9 years. Upgraded to an SSD many years ago. Since I really want to upgrade to Catalina I decided to install an NVidia GTX 770M. I flashed the card before installing to Nick‘s latest bios. This went fine.

After installing the card to my iMac I am finding strange behavior:

- The iMac will not start with the LCD attached. I get one LED on the logic board and the fans spin for a second when pushing the power buttons.
- With no LCD attached, the iMac starts fine. It boots and I can connect through screen sharing. I can find the GPU, it shows as GeForce GTX 770M by Nick. Macos running fine, how’re all the fans are spinning at the loudest.
- For a second I was afraid I fried my LCD somehow, but reinstalling the original GPU renders my machine fully functional. Fans are at normal speeds.

My question:
Is this known behavior and is there a fix for it (so I have to read through the other 150 pages ? Or does this mean my Nvidia GTX 770M is faulty and I have to return it?

Many thanks!

 

[Jforte]

Hoping someone can give me a pointer here - I've done a few 2011 upgrades on 21.5" iMacs, this is the first one I've done on a 27". Problem I've got is no display, and an apparently unresponsive keyboard.

So to give you a brief rundown of what I did and what parts I used - I took everything apart as usual, no problems, definitely nothing broken while working. I took out the old i5 CPU and replaced with i7 2600k - put some new thermal paste in place and reassembled. I then removed the AMD graphics card and replaced with a K2000M. I had removed the original X clamp from the K2000M but noticed that the original AMD card had an X clamp screwed in place with a kind of rubbery backing (presumably to prevent it conducting electricity. I screwed this clamp back in place the same way round as it had been on the AMD card. I fitted two Samsung SSDs, one in the expansion slot and one in the ODD connector. It was a bit of a squeeze getting the connectors on with the hard drive cables in place as well, but everything lined up eventually.

I put the logicboard back in place and connected up all the cables (again, definitely nothing broken and everything connected where it should be). Put the screen back on and plugged in, pressed the power button and I got nothing, no fans, no chime, nothing at all. I took the screen back off to see what the LEDs would show when I powered on, this time I got the startup chime followed by a slow, regular beep - I had forgotten to put the RAM in. So, put in the RAM, put the screen back on, one screw and my hand holding it in place - this time I got the chime followed by hard drive activity.

Before I had done this work, I setup the Mac to boot into Windows with the thought that I could flash the Nvidia card from within Windows. So the hard drive rumbled away for a while but nothing showed on the screen. So I switched it off, restarted and pressed ALT, although I was obviously blind at this level with the unflashed card, I remembered the key presses to boot into Mac OS. However, the Mac didn't seem to respond to the keyboard at all. Left to its own devices, sometimes it will randomly reboot.

So to sum up - power, yes; boot chime, yes; hard drive activity, yes; display of any kind, no; recognition of keyboard input, probably no.

Any thoughts much appreciated. Thanks

I'm sorry for late reply, but i have one question:
Does the iMac 2011 accepts the 2600k i7 CPU without problems and can Run high Sierra, Mojave, Catalina...?
Thanks...

 

[rc3105]

Which 2011? I just realized today that my 21" 2011 doesn't have enough ooomph to spin up a regular 3.5" hd.

Probably because it has a i7-2600K instead of a 2600S. My 27"-2011 otoh works fine

 

[Jforte]

Which 2011? I just realized today that my 21" 2011 doesn't have enough ooomph to spin up a regular 3.5" hd.

Probably because it has a i7-2600K instead of a 2600S. My 27"-2011 otoh works fine

Sorry... A 27 inch model. I'm trying to get to life another 27 inch mid 2011 to give to a friend of my 19 year old Son, who haves financial problems and his laptop just died. They are at home, but having classes using internet...
I Saw a good deal to purchase a 2600k, but don't know if it works without problems on a iMac 27 mid 2011 (with high sierra, or Catalina)... Can you confirm that works?

 

[rc3105]

It'll be fine, the 27" power supply has plenty to spare.

I'm running a 27" 2011 with a 2600k and a K1100m video card. Works great and stays nice and cool.

 

[Berenod]

Might have found a nice 770m - any reason why this wouldn't work now that Alienware / Dell isn't the only recommendation? It says its for MSI / Clevo.

Thanks

Good chance it'll work.

I have a mid 2010 27", I5-760 imac and have just yesterday stuck a Clevo gtx780m in.
Booted straight away.

Assuming you have a 27", on the 21.5" it won't work at all, not enough power going to the mxm port for the GPU.

 

[internetzel]

The 2GB WX4130 from eBay China arrived sooner than expected, on Tuesday.
So I spent my easter holidays with testing that card and the K1100m in my late 2009 27" i5 iMac.

The WX4130 is a Dell card with a Dell VBIOS, and I left it for the first tests without flashing another VBIOS. Unfortunately I couldn't access the VBIOS using the CH341a - the CH341a always powered down after being connected to the EEPROM for one second. Never had such a problem with the K1100m.
So I installed the card without heat sink in order to see whether it was recognized - and it worked, without backlight, out of the box!
UEFI booting into Windows 10 as well as into 10.13 worked, the card and the attached screen were recognized correctly (Windows 10 drivers fully working, 10.13 using the Radeon framebuffer), as far as I could tell by logging in via VNC or Remote Desktop.
For further testing I mounted the MXM-A heat sink on the card - but the iMac wouldn't power on after that. I realized that some SMD coils on the corner made contact with the heat sink and put adhesive tape in that place. The very large copper plate of the heat sink also possibly made contact to some small SMD components that have about the same height as the GPU die - so I put adhesive tape on the copper plate where it doesn't touch the GPU die.
After that the machine powered up again!

Next step was trying the WX4150 GOP BIOS. That could be flashed successfully using atiflash on Windows 10. After a reboot (I didn't use OpenCore for booting yet), Windows 10 drivers failed to launch but the system still booted and permitted logging in remotely. 10.13 simply rebooted during boot up - presumably because of a kernel panic.
So I reflashed the original BIOS for booting into 10.13 and preparing an OpenCore boot stick. Rebooting from that stick brought up the backlight and a garbled but usable screen! So the GOP driver was working, but the RAM configuration seemed wrong. The 2GB WX4130 has the same amount of memory chips but half the capacity so I looked into modifying the WX4150 VBIOS and ended up using that nicely working PolarisBiosEditor and a hex editor for copying the RAM configuration from the original BIOS to the WX4150 GOP BIOS.
It took many tries of modifying, flashing and rebooting but in the end it almost worked out! Using that VBIOS I got backlight and working screen in the OpenCore boot loader and Windows 10 UEFI booted well and recognized the card as a 2GB WX4150 and the drivers seemed to be working fine. The Radeon Pro advanced settings panel didn't open so I couldn't see to which port the internal screen was attached to; it did when booting with the original BIOS, and showed the screen on port 4 of 6 (in both Windows 10 and 10.13).
But unfortunately 10.13 and 10.14, which I've got on an external hard drive, both kernel panic when loading the X4000 kext.
So at that point I think I could need some guidance how to further proceed - in the end it's my only Intel Mac and our main working machine, so I cannot risk ruining it by taking apart and reassembling or flashing a corrupt VBIOS.

In my opinion that card would be great for the late 2009 iMac - absolutely no need for a faster, more power consuming card in that machine. And I paid less than 100€ for it, including delivery. One coil seems slightly damaged but apparently the card is working.

By the way; the K1100m is working as expected.
Edit: The K1100m does even have working native brightness control in Windows 10!!! And I mean Windows 10 native, not done by the Bootcamp driver. Just do what was posted here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforc...amp-display-brightness-problem-with-34052-wh/. I've installed the Quadro DCH drivers version 426.50 .

 

[Berenod]

Been through a reasonable part of this topic, but seem to find very few performance questions.

With all the Corona free time I suddenly have, decided to upgrade my old imac (see signature for specs) with a Clevo GTX780m which i picked up rather cheap (for Europe anyway, about 100 US$).

After the needed grinding away at the heatsink to accommodate the two whatever things they are, and putting everything back in the old machine, the imac booted straight of the bat.

Obviously with the known things like no bootscreen, no brightness controls etc.
Things I can live with, enough so I am not planning on doing the GPU bios modification.

Only question I have, the card seems to be seriously underperforming as to what I would expect. It is obviously a decent improvement over the HD5750 1GB which was in there before, but not nearly what I would expect.

I have installed the Nvidia webdriver, as well as the Cuda drivers for MacOS.

In GFXbench, when I compare my card with the benchmarks of the Nvidia Geforce GTX780m Mac edition, I seem to be getting on most tests around half the FPS compared to the original Mac GTX.

The only exception being the T-rex (on-screen) and the ALU2 on-screen tests, which come in about the same as the original MAC gtx card. Strangely enough the off-screen results for both thise tests my card again only achieves half of wath the mac GTX does...

Also, temperatures on the GPU heatsink barely go up (nor does the ODD fan spins faster, it's coupled to he GPU sensor through Mac's fan control) during the benchmarking (or whatever else I do with it), considering this is supposedly a 125W TDP chip it seems to me it is effectively working at a reduced speed or so...
Also using the standard two heatpipe heatsing which was in the imac...

Any guesses?

I am sort of thinking CPU bottleneck, but should this be an issue when benching with what basically are rather old tests?
I do have an i7-870 lying around, which should be a fair bit faster then the current dual core i5 in there, but, as the machine is plenty fast and smooth for what I use it for, I am a bit reluctant to pull the main board and swap out the cpu...

Thanks in advance!

 

[Berenod]

Another unexpected (but smallish) issue is the sleep state (something with missing or wrong kext's).

I cannot, as expected, put the imac into sleep mode. No problem here
However, if the energy settings are configured to put the imac to sleep after x minutes idle time, it will effectively go to sleep.
So Screen off and all fans completely off. The machine also cools down completely, so I assume pretty much nothing is alive in it.

Only, it is not possible to get out of this state. Key presses, clicks on the trackpad, noth brings it to life. Not even pushing the power button on the back. Pretty much a dead machine.

Only removing the powercord, plugging it back in, and then powering up the machine with the powerbutton brings it back to life.

Letting the screen alone go to sleep works normal, backlight shuts of completely an very soon after the fans turn at minimum speed as almost no heat is generated with everything sitting at idle and the screen off.

So sliding the "Computer sleep" bar to "never" in the energy setting solves the issue of the imac going into that frozn off state...

 

[tgaillar]

Hello,

Recently installed a 860m and could only boot Ubuntu until I flashed to recommended rom and noticed that the Ubuntu 19.10 and 18 allowed brightness control with original or new rom file until I added Nvidia kexts. Would it be possible to use the Linux base driver in Mac 10.13 to get brightness control back? also have you had any luck with a modified boot rom file for the 860m possibly?

Yes, the linux Nouveau driver was specifically made for the Nvidia GPUs (Wikipedia) and it natively manages brightness control out of the MXM board (a PWM in the GPU with output to specifics pins on the MXM connector -- an MXM specification).

I was (and still am) waiting for my K1100m and K2000m boards to confirm that (the same way the AMD-based MXM boards natively work, by the way).

 

[NOTNlCE]

The 2GB WX4130 from eBay China arrived sooner than expected, on Tuesday.
So I spent my easter holidays with testing that card and the K1100m in my late 2009 27" i5 iMac.

But unfortunately 10.13 and 10.14, which I've got on an external hard drive, both kernel panic when loading the X4000 kext.
So at that point I think I could need some guidance how to further proceed - in the end it's my only Intel Mac and our main working machine, so I cannot risk ruining it by taking apart and reassembling or flashing a corrupt VBIOS.

Thank you for testing this - this is fantastic information for some of the cheaper cards. I wonder if a device ID can be injected or something else can be done to allow this to work, since most Polaris cards *should* have macOS support. Keep that card handy, if you can. Perhaps Nick or someone else can resolve the issue with macOS.

 

[Aesthetica]

Ordered a Clevo / MSI 770m and a 3 pipe heatsink. Looking forward to getting on with this!

 

[internetzel]

Thank you for testing this - this is fantastic information for some of the cheaper cards. I wonder if a device ID can be injected or something else can be done to allow this to work, since most Polaris cards *should* have macOS support. Keep that card handy, if you can. Perhaps Nick or someone else can resolve the issue with macOS.

I hope Nick can give me some indications. After all using the original VBIOS macOS boots perfectly with working Polaris drivers - just without backlight. I can easily change the device ID in the VBIOS, but when I changed the IDs in Nick's VBIOS to match the original VBIOS the backlight wasn't turned on anymore in OpenCore and macOS panicked nonetheless - although I'm not 100% sure whether I actually tested with the correct memory configuration and the original IDs, but I know that the correct device IDs break the backlight in OpenCore (meaning the GOP driver doesn't work). I think I could find out about the relations between the VBIOS, OpenCore and the macOS drivers but that would take much time.
So I'll give Nick some time to show interest in getting the WX4130 and maybe WX4150 working.
By the way I forgot to mention that when UEFI booting into Windows 10 using my modded WX4150 GOP VBIOS, there seems to be some resource conflict between the (useless) DisplayPort audio for the internal display and the internal bluetooth adapter - resulting in the bluetooth driver to fail and being disabled. Maybe that DisplayPort audio for the internal display needs to be disabled in the VBIOS for preventing the kernel panic when booting macOS?!

 

[Borak]

How to install Mojave on iMac 27 Mid 2011 without the bootmenu?
I installed the Nvidia GTX 770M GPU and would like to install it through Dosdude.
Does anyone here speak Portuguese?

 

[Jforte]

How to install Mojave on iMac 27 Mid 2011 without the bootmenu?
I installed the Nvidia GTX 770M GPU and would like to install it through Dosdude.
Does anyone here speak Portuguese?

I speak portuguese...
You skip some steps, like flash the card with vbios from Nick...
[automerge]1587060102[/automerge]

I speak portuguese...
You skip some steps, like flash the card with vbios from Nick...

You can go to preferences and choose were the iMac to boot from...

 

[shadowlabs9]

Hi
I'm new in the forum.
I have a 2011 imac 21.5 with faulty graphic card since a few days.
I've read lots of information to proceed to the replacement.
I would like to know about gtx765m Vs quadro k2100/1100 thining in some future proof Vs risk of instability. Also since I'm from Portugal where can I find those cards in Europe ?

Best regards

 

[Rhino_60]

Hi,
after several days of study in this fantastic forum, I'm waiting the components for upgrading my iMac 21.5" mid 2011: video card K2100M (that I'll flash with a CH341A programmer thanks to @Nick [D]vB), and CPU i7-2600S.
The problem is that now I've reviewed photos of CPU that i've buyed and it isn't i7-2600S but is a i72600 ! [See attached photo]
My question is: has the i7-2600 the same compatibility of i7-2600s with my iMac 21.5 or I must to buy the i7-2600s one ?
Thanks in advance for your help.