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

[Allistah]

Ha! I got into the Linux USB drive again! It booted... Going to try and re-flash it now and see what happens..

Ok, this is the display I got when I tried to refresh - it went really fast so I don't know if it really re-wrote the flash or not. Is there any way I can make sure it forces the flash to flash so to speak?

I just did a verify and it is telling me that the sizes are different:

I have not rebooted yet. I'm not sure what I should do. Should I attempt to flash it again?

Another update:
Ok, a couple things.. I don't think my video card is toast as I was able to boot back into the Linux ISB drive and flash it again. I got the same result. This is a K4100M so is there anything else that I should have one to make this thing work other than just flash the card? Should I be able to boot into High Sierra with just flashing the bios? I re-downloaded the firmware and did a diff with the one I flashed it with and they were identical. So the version I'm flashing with is the right one and is the same. I'm a little concerned that the sizes are different in the above screenshots though.

I can hear the hard drive booting when I plug it back in. Then it stops, then reboots. I think that must be OS X crashing or something and rebooting.

Anything else I can do for this flash to ensure it's accurate and/or correct?

 

[nols]

Is there a chance to get the brightness control working on a GTX780M? I have good valley score but the display with 100% brightness is getting very hot after some time of working.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

I'm trying to see if I can get the Linux USB drive to boot. Maybe I can get back into it and re-flash or something. One thing that it is not doing though without the hard drive plugged in is auto-rebooting. So maybe it was trying to boot off the drive and it was kernel panicking or something maybe which caused the reboot? I would think the keyboard would have worked though. I'm also wondering if the speaker is turned down which is why I'm not hearing any sounds. How do a wipe the SMC and PRAM so all that stuff is reset? Anything else you'd suggest?
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I wonder if I should leave the internal display cables unplugged while I try to boot this usb drive to re-flash it?

If this turned out to be a bad flash, what are my options? Can I somehow get it re-flashed or did I just burn $120?

I'm wondering if I should buy a programmer to re-flash this firmware on this card. In theory, that would fix it (if that was the problem - correct?) I have a K4100M card, is there a known firmware flash tool that I should buy that works with this chip on this card?

Would these work to re-flash that chip on this video card?


View attachment 938458

No, will not work. Please read the first post and the flash options described there. The MXM-B Nvidia cards have with 99% probability an WSON type BIOS chip which you cannot clip. Use the nvflash options described (Linux, Windows 7).

Just flash again if you believe to have a bad flash. I most cases hardware problems cannot be solved with software tools. If you cannot get the card working get another one, sorry. I am just the messenger.

Yesterday I had a 2011 having a K4100M installed in a "boot chime loop", i.e. it just rebooted within seconds for several minutes until I pulled the power plug. I had to deinstall all parts and assemble it again. Now it works, surprisingly. But I had a second iMac to cross check each part working in the other system. Which is most likely the only option we have to proof if a piece of hardware is working or not.
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Ha! I got into the Linux USB drive again! It booted... Going to try and re-flash it now and see what happens..

Ok, this is the display I got when I tried to refresh - it went really fast so I don't know if it really re-wrote the flash or not. Is there any way I can make sure it forces the flash to flash so to speak?

View attachment 938460


I just did a verify and it is telling me that the sizes are different:
View attachment 938461

I have not rebooted yet. I'm not sure what I should do. Should I attempt to flash it again?

Another update:
Ok, a couple things.. I don't think my video card is toast as I was able to boot back into the Linux ISB drive and flash it again. I got the same result. This is a K4100M so is there anything else that I should have one to make this thing work other than just flash the card? Should I be able to boot into High Sierra with just flashing the bios? I re-downloaded the firmware and did a diff with the one I flashed it with and they were identical. So the version I'm flashing with is the right one and is the same. I'm a little concerned that the sizes are different in the above screenshots though.

I can hear the hard drive booting when I plug it back in. Then it stops, then reboots. I think that must be OS X crashing or something and rebooting.

Anything else I can do for this flash to ensure it's accurate and/or correct?

The ROMS we provide here have full chip size to be used with a clip programmer, i.e. they are padded with ZERO bytes at the end.

nvflash writes those files completely, but when reading it omits the trailing empty bytes and you get a smaller file. This is a widely known feature.

Give the system a reboot and try!

 

[Tom.Tom]

@Allistah - are you 100% sure your K4100m is OK? I bought used K2100m after flashing it worked for about 30 minutes and then the display went completely black, but the system works fine. No image on the internal display, nor on the external, LED #4 is off. Reading different sources seems to point that no image on the external display usually means bad GPU. I still need to confirm that my symptoms are caused by the fact that this K2100m simply failed after those 30 minutes, but faulty K4100m may be the problem in your case as well...

 

[Cordonblu]

Question.. I just installed a K4100M in my 2011 27" iMac. Install went well, I was able to ssh into the machine and flash the firmware and that went fine too. I rebooted the machine and I am getting all four LEDs on on the motherboard which I think is good. When I boot it, the screen backlight comes on but I don't get any boot chime or Apple logo. Not sure what to do at this point? Anyone have any tips? If you let it stay in this state for a few minutes it seems to reboot itself.

I think I may have plugged the hard drive into the wrong port on the motherboard and now I can see the labels on the board. Does the hard drive get plugged into the top port or the other one? Which one does the optical drive get plugged into?

I can't help you with the blank screen but the sata ports are: the one with a special conector is used for the hdd, the slimline in the middle is used for the ODD and the last one is a free sata3 slimline that you can use.

 

[Allistah]

@Allistah - are you 100% sure your K4100m is OK? I bought used K2100m after flashing it worked for about 30 minutes and then the display went completely black, but the system works fine. No image on the internal display, nor on the external, LED #4 is off. Reading different sources seems to point that no image on the external display usually means bad GPU. I still need to confirm that my symptoms are caused by the fact that this K2100m simply failed after those 30 minutes, but faulty K4100m may be the problem in your case as well...

I'm not 100% sure the K4100M is ok. How would I know or check? I get 4 LEDs that light up, I can flash it over and over without any problems booting from the Linux USB drive. I made sure the card is seated well. Everything is plugged in, etc. I would think that if the video card was toast, you wouldn't be able to flash it?

Maybe I should go in and remove the heatsink for the video card and see if suddenly I get video - then shut it off really quick. Maybe something is touching on the video card from the heatsink maybe. I checked that pretty well though..

 

[Cordonblu]

I'm not 100% sure the K4100M is ok. How would I know or check? I get 4 LEDs that light up, I can flash it over and over without any problems booting from the Linux USB drive. I made sure the card is seated well. Everything is plugged in, etc. I would think that if the video card was toast, you wouldn't be able to flash it?

Maybe I should go in and remove the heatsink for the video card and see if suddenly I get video - then shut it off really quick. Maybe something is touching on the video card from the heatsink maybe. I checked that pretty well though..

I have noticed that windows and linux aren't that picky with the gpu so a troubleshooting step you can do is boot windows or a live cd of ubuntu and check if the gpu is alright from there. Also recheck if the gpu is propertly covered with k5 and is not shorting with the heatsink.

 

[Wania]

I'm not 100% sure the K4100M is ok. How would I know or check? I get 4 LEDs that light up, I can flash it over and over without any problems booting from the Linux USB drive. I made sure the card is seated well. Everything is plugged in, etc. I would think that if the video card was toast, you wouldn't be able to flash it?

Maybe I should go in and remove the heatsink for the video card and see if suddenly I get video - then shut it off really quick. Maybe something is touching on the video card from the heatsink maybe. I checked that pretty well though..

did you modify the X-Clamp before mounting the card?

 

[Ausdauersportler]

I'm not 100% sure the K4100M is ok. How would I know or check? I get 4 LEDs that light up, I can flash it over and over without any problems booting from the Linux USB drive. I made sure the card is seated well. Everything is plugged in, etc. I would think that if the video card was toast, you wouldn't be able to flash it?

Maybe I should go in and remove the heatsink for the video card and see if suddenly I get video - then shut it off really quick. Maybe something is touching on the video card from the heatsink maybe. I checked that pretty well though..

I would not run this card without a heat sink! You may just kill it. Booting into Linux does not say anything about the GPU. This Linux boot stick doesn't initialise the graphics mode like MacOS does during the boot phase. So it may run perfectly fine in this text mode, even initialise the graphics mode, but fail during benchmarks.

For that reason sellers of used graphics cards use benchmark utilities to cross check a card. Of course, tests from the past are no guarantees for the future. But it is the best we can do...
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did you modify the X-Clamp before mounting the card?

You can install this card perfectly with the original Apple smaller clamp came the with the older MXM A cards or the clamp comes with the Nvidia card. You only need to drive out the rivets from the Nvidia clamp.

 

[Wania]

You can install this card perfectly with the original Apple smaller clamp came the with the older MXM A cards or the clamp comes with the Nvidia card. You only need to drive out the rivets from the Nvidia clamp.

my iMac 2011 had an AMD 2GB GPU and I had to modify the x-clamp to fit the k4100m

 

[Ausdauersportler]

my iMac 2011 had an AMD 2GB GPU and I had to modify the x-clamp to fit the k4100m

Did you read my post? I was not writing about the MXM-B Apple X-Clamp In that case just re use the clamp coming with your K4100M. No experiments...

 

[Wania]

Did you read my post? I was not writing about the MXM-B Apple X-Clamp In that case just re use the clamp coming with your K4100M. No experiments...

I meant maybe @Allistah has an electrical short on the card

 

[Allistah]

Well, I think that K4100M is toast. I can still flash it and all that but nothing works. I put the original card back in and thankfully, it still works and it booted right up. That tells me that everything is in working order, and I'm putting things back together correctly.

The prices for these K4100M cards is crazy... They're $150 on Ebay. ..and that's no guarantee you'll get it working. You can't test to see if its a working card before you even install it.

The original X brace worked fine on this MXM-B card. Visually, I made sure that nothing was touching. I put the heatsink on it dry, then looked inside with a bright light to make sure things had a gap.

I'm not sure what to do at this point. Sort of feel like I burned $120 and a whole lot of hours for nothing.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

Well, I think that K4100M is toast. I can still flash it and all that but nothing works. I put the original card back in and thankfully, it still works and it booted right up. That tells me that everything is in working order, and I'm putting things back together correctly.

The prices for these K4100M cards is crazy... They're $150 on Ebay. ..and that's no guarantee you'll get it working. You can't test to see if its a working card before you even install it.

The original X brace worked fine on this MXM-B card. Visually, I made sure that nothing was touching. I put the heatsink on it dry, then looked inside with a bright light to make sure things had a gap.

I'm not sure what to do at this point. Sort of feel like I burned $120 and a whole lot of hours for nothing.

You might now re check the installation on the sink. This is IMHO the most important part of the complete hardware installation. I use strips of tape to isolate components coming close to the sink. Apple did the same, especially with the MXM-A cards. I have seen now all versions of an Apple heat sink and some had this transparent Tesa (or M3) strips, too.

 

[Allistah]

The heatsink is all back together in the machine with the original video card. Typing this on that machine now. Can you tell me where what areas I should tape? I do have isolating tape.

Is that K5 stuff isolating at all or should I make sure to not get that stuff on any of the circuits on the board? It's messy and it did get all over the place. Here is a picture of the card - can you point out what areas I should tape?

 

[Ausdauersportler]

The heatsink is all back together in the machine with the original video card. Typing this on that machine now. Can you tell me where what areas I should tape? I do have isolating tape.

Is that K5 stuff isolating at all or should I make sure to not get that stuff on any of the circuits on the board? It's messy and it did get all over the place. Here is a picture of the card - can you point out what areas I should tape?

View attachment 938574

Hmm, I would say with this card just where the coils sit, the square metal blocks having the number R47, R22, and R56 printed on the top. Additionally/Alternatively I put K5 pro on top, if the coils do not get into contact with the sink. This paste is not conductive.

All the caps are a source of danger, too. But this card has a really high GPU keeping the board and the flat components in some distance from the sink. Which is different with some AMD cards I was playing with...

 

[Juan Anibal Rivera]

Perfect, thank you for your help. I will be doing that in the morning, will report back once it’s done.

Hello there! Update for my computer. I put back the hd 6750m and the computer turned on normally. So everything good there, the copper heat spreader was probably shorting out the connection to the board. But I’m having a problem with the new CPU. It turns on fine and it’s correctly identified, but it is underperforming quite hard, and the CPU fan is spinning up uncontrollably. The fan thing is fine, I have my own fan control app, but the underperforming part is a concern. The CPU gave me a Geekbench 4 score of 1800 single core, 6600 multicore. That’s even worse than the original i5. What could be the problem?

 

[Ausdauersportler]

Hello there! Update for my computer. I put back the hd 6750m and the computer turned on normally. So everything good there, the copper heat spreader was probably shorting out the connection to the board. But I’m having a problem with the new CPU. It turns on fine and it’s correctly identified, but it is underperforming quite hard, and the CPU fan is spinning up uncontrollably. The fan thing is fine, I have my own fan control app, but the underperforming part is a concern. The CPU gave me a Geekbench 4 score of 1800 single core, 6600 multicore. That’s even worse than the original i5. What could be the problem?

Which CPU upgrade you are writing about?

 

[Juan Anibal Rivera]

Which CPU upgrade you are writing about?

I upgraded the original i5 2500s to the i7 2600. Applied thermal paste correctly, the idle temp is 32C-35C.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

I upgraded the original i5 2500s to the i7 2600. Applied thermal paste correctly, the idle temp is 32C-35C.

You might add you complete setup to your own signature, it is so complicated to search through 3 pages and 50 posts just to find out which machine you have and which CPU and GPU you are using.
You own a 27" iMac 2011? Did you reconnect the thermal sensor of the CPU heat sink on the back of your logic board? Did you install the LCD back? Without the CPU will not boost.

 

[Allistah]

Hmm, I would say with this card just where the coils sit, the square metal blocks having the number R47, R22, and R56 printed on the top. Additionally/Alternatively I put K5 pro on top, if the coils do not get into contact with the sink. This paste is not conductive.

All the caps are a source of danger, too. But this card has a really high GPU keeping the board and the flat components in some distance from the sink. Which is different with some AMD cards I was playing with...

The CPU does sit pretty high. Those items that you called out sit at about 3/4 the height of the GPU so I know R47 and such aren't touching.

I put a lot of K5 on it to make sure it was all in contact. What are the chances that the card will take a flash but not produce video? Now that I know the machine and all connectors work fine, think this card is really broken?

 

[Ausdauersportler]

The CPU does sit pretty high. Those items that you called out sit at about 3/4 the height of the GPU so I know R47 and such aren't touching.

I put a lot of K5 on it to make sure it was all in contact. What are the chances that the card will take a flash but not produce video? Now that I know the machine and all connectors work fine, think this card is really broken?

The nvflash tool checks the success by reading and comparing during the flash. Chances to have a bad flash are near zero. We should start to create checksums with our BIOS files to give every user the chance to check the download. You already did a second flash. I am out of options.

Chances to have a perfect flash but a failing card are pretty high. All these cards are used, although some sellers still offer new spare parts. I got such a WX4170 and another 780M.

When I tried to find a 780M I had a 50% success rate...these cards are getting too expensive to do such experiments, again. Honestly I am thinking or dropping the first page entirely. It just gives all potential sellers a nice opportunity to ask for the double price...

 

[Allistah]

The nvflash tool checks the success by reading and comparing during the flash. Chances to have a bad flash are near zero. We should start to create checksums with our BIOS files to give every user the chance to check the download. You already did a second flash. I am out of options.

Chances to have a perfect flash but a failing card are pretty high. All these cards are used, although some sellers still offer new spare parts. I got such a WX4170 and another 780M.

When I tried to find a 780M I had a 50% success rate...these cards are getting too expensive to do such experiments, again. Honestly I am thinking or dropping the first page entirely. It just gives all potential sellers a nice opportunity to ask for the double price...

Yeah, at the rate of 50% success and $150 a pop, it's not worth it. I'm just thankful that I didn't break the machine and it's still working with the stock video card.

For the K4100M cards, this one was a Dell. Should I be looking to get one from a different type of machine maybe? I think the laptop was a Dell 6800. I wonder if those are ok?

 

[Juan Anibal Rivera]

You might add you complete setup to your own signature, it is so complicated to search through 3 pages and 50 posts just to find out which machine you have and which CPU and GPU you are using.
You own a 27" iMac 2011? Did you reconnect the thermal sensor of the CPU heat sink on the back of your logic board? Did you install the LCD back? Without the CPU will not boost.

Ok, my complete setup is as follows:
2011 27 inch iMac, i7 2600, HD 6750m, 16gb (4gb x 4) 1333mhz RAM, 256gb SSD (boot drive) & 1TB SSHD.

It could be as you said and I didn’t connect the CPU thermal sensor cable. Will get back to you on that. Thanks.

 

[highvoltage12v]

Hello there! Update for my computer. I put back the hd 6750m and the computer turned on normally. So everything good there, the copper heat spreader was probably shorting out the connection to the board. But I’m having a problem with the new CPU. It turns on fine and it’s correctly identified, but it is underperforming quite hard, and the CPU fan is spinning up uncontrollably. The fan thing is fine, I have my own fan control app, but the underperforming part is a concern. The CPU gave me a Geekbench 4 score of 1800 single core, 6600 multicore. That’s even worse than the original i5. What could be the problem?

If running with any Temp sensor unplugged the fans will spinning at full speed and the CPU will be locked to 1.6GHz, so if your GPU/ODD/CPU/LCD temp sensors are unplugged you will be stuck at 1.6GHz. So your HP k4100m flashed to the Correct VBIOS by @nikey22 cannot output a picture to the internal LCD? I wonder if the HP boards are missing a signal out that our LCD needs? Anyone here successfully have a working HP board?
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Yeah, at the rate of 50% success and $150 a pop, it's not worth it. I'm just thankful that I didn't break the machine and it's still working with the stock video card.

For the K4100M cards, this one was a Dell. Should I be looking to get one from a different type of machine maybe? I think the laptop was a Dell 6800. I wonder if those are ok?

My card was a Dell card for an M6800 worked fine. Pay attention for the bios version sticker as this will make sure it's from the same model computer.