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iM 4,1-14,4 2011 iMac Graphics Card Upgrade
- Thread starter MichaelDT
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Get the card out, PRAM and SMC reset, than put it in again and restart. If this fails read post #1 common hardware problems.
Read post #1, again! TDM is working with High Sierra, only. So the solution is easy: Go back to High Sierra!Thanks all for the informations provided here, this is amazing thread, I would like to share my experience, hopefully it can help others too; Our 2011 iMac was already upgraded with AC wifi card, scored a $65 K2100M from ebay and installed it this time to get into some features in the new OS, installed Catalina successfully with the following methods.
1. K2100M installed without any heat sink modifications.
2. BIOS version made by @Nick [D]vB; followed THIS POST to flash video card with ssh which makes the process really easy
3. Fresh installed high High Sierra first, applied all security patches, a couple of time firmware update failure, keep trying finally got through
4. In high sierra, installed this patch to prevent black screen, installed fan control, set ODD to GPU die temp
5. Used dosdude1's Catalina patcher to upgrade to Catalina.
6. Install this package to address sleep problems, then system kept rebooting, get into safe mode and saw panic message regarding H3000 video card etc; Fixed the panic with another sleep method this post which obviously overwrite the problematic components.
7. Setup Opencore 0.6.3 usb, set it as startup disk. iMac can boot as usual now.
Tested all these features working perfectly.
1. Sleep, wake up.
2. native brightness control, max brightness seems right.
3. Bluetooth, LTE hotspot works; WIFI download can sustain 100MB/s on large file transfer, it's the max speed this card can get.
4. Airdrop, Hand off, Continuity works perfectly.
5. Apple watch unlock_mac/confirm password/payment all works.
6. H264, hardware acceleration works, metal benchmark in normal range. 20+GB 4k video play is smooth. little choppy on 60GB 4k video, but probably exceeds the capability of video card.
7. The fan is dead silent most of time. In regular use GPU stays about 45C with fan at 1150rpm
Only thing I found not working properly is the target display mode. CMD+F2 can enter target display mode as external monitor, but CMD+F2 again won't bring back to iMac screen, unplug the cable make no difference, the only way to get it back is to force reboot. I am wondering whether others have similar experience, I would highly appreciate if there is solution since I used target display mode at work everyday
Thanks for pointing it out. Although read through the first post many times, but still missed the fine print; TDM were mentioned so many times with other loss of features which were brought back with patchers, I got wrong impression that TDM would be among them. Too bad, hopefully it would be there soon.
If you start to experiment on it, may be. Here is no one working on it any longer....
From your description, it seems your new card isn't posting, and likely incompatible.
Better get another one not of the HP brand for a higher chance of success.
Yes, and i change it for a new one, but nothing, Thanks for the reply.
Hello, thanks for answering, before writing these last messages requesting help I have read and reread almost the entire thread, I have completely disassembled and assembled the imac about 20 times, testing with various configurations, I have tried everything you have told me several times and The truth is that I am enormously grateful to you, although I had already done it, it is not a bad thing to try again in case I forgot something, and they are important points, even the issue of the battery.
After 2 days of testing there are only 2 options:
- The card is damaged (although I have seen it working inside a hp laptop 5 days ago)
- The point where you say in the "common (hardware) problems":
"... But I recently found a few Nvidia cards showing in some iMacs the same behaviour. Changing the graphics card back let the system boot again (similar to point 6. - instead of a boot loop you get no boot at all). Reason unknown!..."
Bad luck, I'll try tomorrow to do a little reballing to the original damaged amd card.
1000 Thank you all for the help.
I am programmer and would love to contribute, but don't have much expertise on MacOS. If it doesn't take much of your time, Can you point me to knowledge base where to start? It could be an interesting project on Holiday.
Netkas.org has a few Mac vBIOS guru visiting and contribution for reading. It isn’t an easy task to follow ...
But I think whether a GPU card POSTs or not goes beyond the software BIOS, but at the hardware level. Some have looked into the MXM interface but there are so many card variations, brands and versions that no one can find the solution yet.
And TDM is applicable to such a small group of iMacs that no one wants to pay extra effort on this optional feature. The main work is on making the vBIOS work in internal display and expanding the GPU coverage.
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Thanks for your explanation, and it makes sense. I hate to let it go but I probably just retire my near 10 years old iMac to my boys then, we need a big screen in our living room any way, kids are doing a lot of online school now days.
iMac is my personal PC, and I usually TDM to it from MacBook Pro when I work from home, and switch back and forth many times a day. We bought a 4K iMac when it came out, but have to return it since 4k doesn't support TDM.
This afternoon I just brought back home one of my 4k monitor from work and set it up with my new arrived MacMini M1, it's time to upgrade.
Out of topic, M1 chip is game changer, this thing is amazing, outperformed high end intel and the case is not even warm while the intel MacMini is like on fire during the stress testing.
Agree that the M1 and later generation of ARM chips are the way to go. I just want to delay my purchase a little when the new platform is more well developed, supported and stable in a year or two. And my daily use doesn’t involve intensive CPU or GPU function.
BTW, TDM only works in High Sierra. That makes the GPU upgrade not useful if it is not meant for Catalina or Big Sur.
@MACGENUISDUDE For what it's worth, my Linux USB does NOT automatically connect to ethernet, neither on my 2011 iMac or my 2010 Macbook Pro. I have to go through the network setup by hitting the n key on the main screen and then hitting return to go through the prompts. So when I boot to the USB with no display I have to do that process blind, before it will show up on the network.
No idea why my Linux USB doesn't auto-connect, on either of my Macs, but seems to work for everyone else. Could be the issue for you? Make sure you can SSH into Linux with a working display before you attempt with a new card.
No idea why my Linux USB doesn't auto-connect, on either of my Macs, but seems to work for everyone else. Could be the issue for you? Make sure you can SSH into Linux with a working display before you attempt with a new card.
This forum is for iMac GPU upgrade.
OSX installation in unsupported Macs is in other forum threads.
But you can use DosDude1's Mojave Patcher: http://dosdude1.com/mojave/
.I have that
But it says it won't
But I was asking if anyone has done a GPU upgrade
on a 2010 i3 with ATI VIDEO card
Which will not run Mojave
The same kind of uprade as the 2011 Imac etc
But it says it won't
But I was asking if anyone has done a GPU upgrade
on a 2010 i3 with ATI VIDEO card
Which will not run Mojave
The same kind of uprade as the 2011 Imac etc
About Metal Benchmarks:
After the rapid development of new BIOS versions during the last 11 month we needed GPU benchmarks. While the UNIGINE Valley seems to produce stable OpenGL results the GeekBench5 Metal is more a source of annoyance than valid data.
For that reason I still am searching for a more reliable benchmark, it does not need to be a fully fledged suite consisting hundreds of different test cases, but I want something independent of the CPU and easy to use.
Reading an eGPU forum I found this:
Source is available here:
https://github.com/Alia-Traces/MetalBench
Download here:
https://github.com/Alia-Traces/MetalBench/releases/download/v2.0-beta.1/MetalBench_2.0b1.zip
The software runs on Catalina and more recent macOS releases like Big Sur 11.1 Beta.
The benchmark result is the number shown after a while in the bottom right corner of the screen using the glass scene. (The other forest scene does not give me more than 1 or 2 MRays on my WX4150/WX4170/RX 480 cards for an unknown reason. Possibly these GPUs are not fast enough)
Some preliminary results:
Would be nice you guys post some values here and I will ask @NOTNICE to create another web form to upload and review results....
We can add this to the docs on post #1
If somebody finds another suitable benchmark please check and post (check and post)!
After the rapid development of new BIOS versions during the last 11 month we needed GPU benchmarks. While the UNIGINE Valley seems to produce stable OpenGL results the GeekBench5 Metal is more a source of annoyance than valid data.
For that reason I still am searching for a more reliable benchmark, it does not need to be a fully fledged suite consisting hundreds of different test cases, but I want something independent of the CPU and easy to use.
Reading an eGPU forum I found this:
Source is available here:
https://github.com/Alia-Traces/MetalBench
Download here:
https://github.com/Alia-Traces/MetalBench/releases/download/v2.0-beta.1/MetalBench_2.0b1.zip
The software runs on Catalina and more recent macOS releases like Big Sur 11.1 Beta.
The benchmark result is the number shown after a while in the bottom right corner of the screen using the glass scene. (The other forest scene does not give me more than 1 or 2 MRays on my WX4150/WX4170/RX 480 cards for an unknown reason. Possibly these GPUs are not fast enough)
Some preliminary results:
| System | macOS | GPU | MRays / Second average |
| 2011 i7-2600 | Big Sur Beta 11.1 | WX4170 | 73 |
| 2010 i5-750 | Big Sur Beta 11.1 | RX 480 | 169 |
| 2011 i5-2400 | Catalina 10.15.7 | WX4150 | 62 |
| 2009 i7-860 | Catalina 10.15.7 | WX4130 | 53 |
Would be nice you guys post some values here and I will ask @NOTNICE to create another web form to upload and review results....
We can add this to the docs on post #1
If somebody finds another suitable benchmark please check and post (check and post)!
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Well
I still have not gotten the 2 > 2011 iMACs to work in ssh
So I can not flash either of the GOOD Nvidia K3100M cards
Right now I opened up the 2011 3.1 with the original 6970M
& got the IP address of 192.168.9.24
It was recognized on the network with Angry IP address
So I put in the K3100M & took out the SSD & HD
I plugged in the USB card & powered it up
I got 2 leds & the bong
I even hit N & return as eabloker suggested
Angry IP scanner does not see it & whenI
go to terminal to ssh it does not work & times out
The USB card flashes the whole time
I am stumped ???
My buddy has a Netgear HUB > NOT a router
Does anyone know if you connect directly to the HUB/Switch
between the 2 iMACS
via eithernet if this will connect
& allow me to ssh & flash the card ???
Or does it have to be a router for this to work ???
I still have not gotten the 2 > 2011 iMACs to work in ssh
So I can not flash either of the GOOD Nvidia K3100M cards
Right now I opened up the 2011 3.1 with the original 6970M
& got the IP address of 192.168.9.24
It was recognized on the network with Angry IP address
So I put in the K3100M & took out the SSD & HD
I plugged in the USB card & powered it up
I got 2 leds & the bong
I even hit N & return as eabloker suggested
Angry IP scanner does not see it & whenI
go to terminal to ssh it does not work & times out
The USB card flashes the whole time
I am stumped ???
My buddy has a Netgear HUB > NOT a router
Does anyone know if you connect directly to the HUB/Switch
between the 2 iMACS
via eithernet if this will connect
& allow me to ssh & flash the card ???
Or does it have to be a router for this to work ???
A hub, switch or even a cross-over cable would allow them to talk to each other for SSH, BUT since there is no DHCP in that scenario, you would have to manually configure the network settings for both machines. For that reason I would recommend using a router. Most routers will allow you to tie the MAC address of a device to a static IP so it will always be assigned the same IP.
Does anyone know of a Cheap PC Desktop that uses Nvidia K3100M video cards
So I can put these cards in a Windows 10 machine & flash them that way ?
So I can put these cards in a Windows 10 machine & flash them that way ?
I suspect you would need a laptop with a MXM slot, or perhaps any desktop using a PCI-E to MXM adapter. I've seen those advertised for mining (~$30), but have no experience with one to know if you could access the card and flash with one.
Just a benchmark for comparison in my office iMac late 2015 i5 3.3GHz running Catalina 10.15.7:
Will test mine tonight after work.
Will test mine tonight after work.
I seem to remember that someone in this thread made a bootable USB for Windows 7. This allowed to flash the card from Windows on the iMac. You would have to search Windows 7 in this thread.
Just downloaded package, followed the on screen prompts, and now I have my boot screen back on Catalina. The only thing I am missing with the K1100m is brightness control which I will not bother with because the VBIOS setting is spot on and temps are cool. Runs Valley ay 30 fps.
You need OpenCore to get brightness control with this card. Post #1 is pretty clear about this.