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Hello,

got a K610M card for my 2010 21.5'' iMac 11,2. Flashed it with bios from the first page and installed it, and now iMac is booting fine on High Sierra, card is recognized by OS and seems to be working fine, but on power up I don't see boot screen (screen remains black until OS loads up to the login screen). I though I should see boot screen. Am I missing something ?

[Have not installed OpenCore yet]

Thanks!
 
Hello,

got a K610M card for my 2010 21.5'' iMac 11,2. Flashed it with bios from the first page and installed it, and now iMac is booting fine on High Sierra, card is recognized by OS and seems to be working fine, but on power up I don't see boot screen (screen remains black until OS loads up to the login screen). I though I should see boot screen. Am I missing something ?

[Have not installed OpenCore yet]

Thanks!
On k2100m cards, no boot screen is seen unless 1. You request it on boot with the ALT/Option key.
2. You set OpenCore as your 1st boot device (system preferences) and then use the bootloader on every boot. OpenCore also gives you Backlight control.
 
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Hello,

got a K610M card for my 2010 21.5'' iMac 11,2. Flashed it with bios from the first page and installed it, and now iMac is booting fine on High Sierra, card is recognized by OS and seems to be working fine, but on power up I don't see boot screen (screen remains black until OS loads up to the login screen). I though I should see boot screen. Am I missing something ?

[Have not installed OpenCore yet]

Thanks!
Hey can u please make a screenshot of your about this mac screen?
also after flashing on reboot do a PRAM Reset with CMD + ALT + P + R
 
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Hey can u please make a screenshot of your about this mac screen?
also after flashing on reboot do a PRAM Reset with CMD + ALT + P + R
As @highvoltage12v already explained you will only see a boot selection screen and boot screen if you press alt/option on boot or if you have already installed the Catalina Loader. The BIOS has a "wait cycle" of some seconds, booting an SSD has often finished before the internal screen switches on.

Long story short: The internal screen will not power on unless you

1) press alt/option on boot
2) use the catalina loader
3) wait the "wait cycle" of 10-15s

What you currently experience is "it works as designed". There is no problem, there is a lacking Catalina Loader installation.
 
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ok so update on the k3100m, i have boot screens even tho the rom didnt match it works but i still get the white screens followed by a black screen but also i have lost the use of windows7 unless i boot into safe mde so im not sure what the story is there but if i flashed it back to the stock rom and windows works fine now again.

the second set of k3100m cards are the same but different devID but show as a dell k3100m like the others, windows7 loads the drivers fine and runs well but it seems the vbios is locked as gpu-z and nvflash cannot even read the vbios at all sooo... bad cards... unless i can break into the vbios some how

i got the card booting using the AGC kext without boot screens or vbios into HS and tried to get catalina booting but nothing.. i cant even use the boot version of opencore as the start up disk app gives me the error saying i cannot select this disk :(... gah.
 
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Thanks to all great minds here in achieving the almost impossible in bringing old Macs to the new OS.

Lately I have got hold of a Dell version of WX4150 (......00D_02 board ID).
I read in 1st post that there are two versions of BIOS for it:
-Using the GOP BIOS will get native brightness and a boot selection only with OpenCore.
-Using the EG BIOS version will get a native Apple boot picker with an iMac firmware modification, but no brightness control.

Hence, theoretically all can be achieved via the BIOS without OpenCore Loader.
Are there any further work being done to merge the two to get the best of both worlds?

I read that Mac video cards have an efi loader part and the vbios proper, and the former is important for the boot screen and picker. RX560 seems to be used in one of the Macbook Pro lines and I just wonder whether we can graft the efi portion from that mac video BIOS on the GOP BIOS to get the boot screen ...

But of course, I am just a newbie and not knowledgeable as the geniuses in vbios editing here ...
 
Hey can u please make a screenshot of your about this mac screen?
also after flashing on reboot do a PRAM Reset with CMD + ALT + P + R
1601452489534.png

Yes, I did PRAM reset. Boot progress screen is shown when I do PRAM reset, but not on subsequent boots.
It behaves just like @highvoltage12v said: boot screen does not show unless I hold Alt/Option on boot.
Gonna try OpenCore next, thanks!
 
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Thanks to all great minds here in achieving the almost impossible in bringing old Macs to the new OS.

Lately I have got hold of a Dell version of WX4150 (......00D_02 board ID).
I read in 1st post that there are two versions of BIOS for it:
-Using the GOP BIOS will get native brightness and a boot selection only with OpenCore.
-Using the EG BIOS version will get a native Apple boot picker with an iMac firmware modification, but no brightness control.

Hence, theoretically all can be achieved via the BIOS without OpenCore Loader.
Are there any further work being done to merge the two to get the best of both worlds?

I read that Mac video cards have an efi loader part and the vbios proper, and the former is important for the boot screen and picker. RX560 seems to be used in one of the Macbook Pro lines and I just wonder whether we can graft the efi portion from that mac video BIOS on the GOP BIOS to get the boot screen ...

But of course, I am just a newbie and not knowledgeable as the geniuses in vbios editing here ...
The EFI portion of the VBIOS is the GOP driver. And Apple uses it's own special type of GOP drivers that links against an EFI firmware driver they call CoreEG2. So the EG2 VBIOS contains exactly that Apple EFI part you mentioned.
By checking for the presence of the CoreEG2 driver one could in theory decide to load one or the other, but they are pretty much mutually exclusive.
 
Hi, thanks for all the information. I tried to read the first page and the last ones, but I can't find an answer. A friend will give me his late 2009 27" with gpu problem. I initially had the idea of use it only for Target display mode, that, looking on the web, should work also with gpu problem, the important things is that macOs boot up. But looking on this thread I am considering to fix it. Which should be the cheapest way to make this iMac works again? In the first page I read that custom bios can not be installed on such iMac, thus I want to know which card is the best to use.
Thanks in advance
Hi guys,
I get the iMac. From serial I found it is a mid-2010 27". GPU is so damaged that I Can't see anything on the iMac, only colored vertical lines. Problem is it do not have any internal disk because my friend has to take it out, so now it is without disk. I do not know how to make it working for use as target display. It is possible to install macOS on an external drive and than attach it to the iMac from usb? Can the iMac boot up directly from USB without me doing nothing?
 
Hi guys,
I get the iMac. From serial I found it is a mid-2010 27". GPU is so damaged that I Can't see anything on the iMac, only colored vertical lines. Problem is it do not have any internal disk because my friend has to take it out, so now it is without disk. I do not know how to make it working for use as target display. It is possible to install macOS on an external drive and than attach it to the iMac from usb? Can the iMac boot up directly from USB without me doing nothing?
When there's no internal drive the iMac should try to boot up from external disks automatically. (Maybe a PRAM reset could help to have the iMac behave predictively.)
But nevertheless you will need a working graphics card in order to get anything useful displayed on the screen. Even in target display mode the builtin gpu is responsible for both receiving the mini-DP signal and sending the eDP signal to the internal screen. Even the audio input via mini-DP is managed by the GPU.

Edit: Target display mode seems to circumvent the graphics card, see links in post number #9796 .
 
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When there's no internal drive the iMac should try to boot up from external disks automatically. (Maybe a PRAM reset could help to have the iMac behave predictively.)
But nevertheless you will need a working graphics card in order to get anything useful displayed on the screen. Even in target display mode the builtin gpu is responsible for both receiving the mini-DP signal and sending the eDP signal to the internal screen. Even the audio input via mini-DP is managed by the GPU.
Are you sure of it? On this forum other people says that they can use as target display with screen that doesn't show anything.
Can I install macOS on external drive through another Mac? If yes, which is the correct way?
 
Are you sure of it? On this forum other people says that they can use as target display with screen that doesn't show anything.
Can I install macOS on external drive through another Mac? If yes, which is the correct way?

I said that.
I am using a flashed WX4150, OSX High Sierra. The monitor only shows a black screen when power on the iMac. But it will display in Target Display Mode when receiving signal from another PC.
 
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I said that.
I am using a flashed WX4150, OSX High Sierra. The monitor only shows a black screen when power on the iMac. But it will display in Target Display Mode when receiving signal from another PC.
Thus I think that if I can boot up the Mac, I Can use it as target display
 
I took some research on the WX4150 and RX560.

The GPU core codes printed on the AMD GPU are different.
216-0896288 is WX4150 (RX560)
216-0896088 is RX460 (likely rebranded RX560D)

The GPU core of original RX460 and RX560s are different and vBIOS not cross-flashable.

The green Dell card of board ID 109-C98581-00D_02 V343 VER:1.0 is actually the latter RX460.
The blue HP card of board ID 109-C98581-10_02 is the former RX560.
The green board of board ID 109-C98581-00_02 V343 VER:1.1 is the RX560 since the GPU code is the former.

Sellers often mix them up and some may sell the lower price RX460 at higher cost masquerading as the genuine RX560.

To add in more confusion. There are 14 Compute Units (896 stream processors) and 16 Compute Units (1024 stream processors) versions of the RX560 (Polaris 21 GPU core).
There is no initial distinction as revealed by AMD when released in the market in 2017 but later the former is labelled as RX560D internally, designed for the Chinese cafe market with 896 GCN cores, instead of the standard RX560 with 1024 GCN cores. The cut down version of RX560 is essentially a rebadged RX460. To further muddle the water, the older generation of RX460 is of the different Polaris 11 GPU core (also called Baffin Pro) with 896SP. It was said that all mobile RX560 (called RX560M or RX560 Laptop) is only available with 896SP. In summary, the desktop RX560 can be based on the Polaris 21 (standard RX560) or Polaris 11 (RX460) or a scaled down Polaris 21 (RX560D) but they are all called RX560. The D I guess in the board ID might signify Diminished or Disabled, representing the scaled down RX560D.

That may be why not all WX4150 are equal.

My further research into the most compatible version of vBIOS for the desktop version of 4GB RX560 for Hackintosh revealed that the ASUS BIOS works in both Windows 10 and Mac OSX:
However, the use of Clover or other efi boot loader in Hackintosh may be similar to our Catalina Loader, and thus supports the Apple boot screen since Lilu.kext and WhateverGreen.kext are probably also used.
The details are in Tonymacx86:

But anyway, these may have all been known by the great minds here to give us the present WX4150 ROM already …
I just share what I found.
But sad to know that the EG2 and GOP drivers are mutually exclusive to achieve the functions.
 
An update, this is what appear when I turn on the Mac. It make correctly the sound. Thus it is a gpu problem?
PXL_20200930_105526660.MP.jpg
 
A defective GPU will not show anything useful on the screen. @Nguyen Duc Hieu has a working GPU installed.
are you sure? I read also on the web people that did that

 
are you sure? I read also on the web people that did that

Well, I am sure that a defective GPU will not display anything useful. :)
But the sites you indicate seem to suggest that target display mode circumvents the GPU - in that case target display mode might work even without any graphics card installed at all (which would help in case the defective GPU causes the OS to crash and hang or reboot).
 
I suppose Target Display Mode can work if it uses DisplayPort (2009-2010 iMac) - in that case, the GPU is not required (but you need to boot macOS to make the switch). 2011-2014 iMac require Thunderbolt connection and probably requires a working GPU.
I wonder if the switch that macOS does could be done in EFI for the 2009-2010 iMac)?
 
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I suppose Target Display Mode can work if it uses DisplayPort (2009-2010 iMac) - in that case, the GPU is not required (but you need to boot macOS to make the switch). 2011-2014 iMac require Thunderbolt connection and probably requires a working GPU.
I wonder if the switch that macOS does could be done in EFI for the 2009-2010 iMac)?

I do not know how, but after some shutdowns the iMac starting working normally, thus I can install HighSierra on it and use it as external monitor with a simple usb-c/mini-dp cable.
It has a 2.8 i5 cpu, 12gb RAM, ATI HD5750 1gb. Which video card can be the cheapest that I can buy? I do not need power, I will use it mainly as second screen and sometimes as a machine for web/office
 
Hi can anyone confirm if this card will work in my 27" 2011 iMac:

HP L17822-001 PCA RADEON PRO WX 4150 4GB MXM Mobile

WX 4150 is found on the list of compatible cards on page 1 of this thread, but I am unsure of the HP part.

Thank you in advance.
 
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