I thought of taking off the k4000m and buying this 3100m, can it be fine? I think it's a hp from the serial
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iM 4,1-14,4 2011 iMac Graphics Card Upgrade
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Hello. I’m from Portugal. I have a spare 3 pipe gpu heatsink for mxm type b mxm cards. I thinking of trade it for a working card type an AMD wx4130/wx4150 for an iMac 27 mid 2011 (i know only a few are working on it, it was best if i have a 2009/2010 iMac). If some of you want to discuss it, please pm me...
There is a limit of number of pictures attached to a single post. If we start this we would need a gallery. There are too many broken ones of all types and honestly, what should we write about your particular card? Does not work in a single iMac? Are you sure that you system is really 100% ok after nearly 10 years and one repair attempt?
With the AMD cards we are almost sure that these cards will work fine in a PC laptop but do not post in every iMac. Same happens with some Kepler cards, especially with the older generation K3000M/K4000M/K5000M.
I already placed a warning about old Kepler cards. It is a gamble and it has always been one. I will not be responsible for buying decisions made by others, so we agreed to stay completely out of this business. And I will not answer on request if a particular offer will work in an iMac I never have seen, you can clutter the thread with as many pictures as you want, I will ignore it.
You may start a separate real rumors thread about cards likely not to run. I would like to stay with the facts, facts based on more than a single incident - statistics for beginners: one incident is no incident.
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RX480 only in 2009/2010 search the thread.
RX580 is the WX7100 - read first post.
Hello! I just completed my iMac 2010 27" upgrade from HD5670 to GTX 860M, now running Mojave 10.14.6 (18G7016) for reasons I'll detail below.
First, I'd like to thank all excellent people who made this possible, especially @dosdude1 @nikey22 @highvoltage12v @Ausdauersportler
I'll outline what I did here, in case anyone has the same setup as me (iMac 11,3 + GTX 860M, but I'd assume any other ++ Kepler cards too). I think it'd help that subgroup of people, because in this thread we're working with so many combinations that at times I had 10 tabs opened and still felt fuzzy about what to do next.
1. Found a refurbished unit of GTX 860M 2GB on eBay. (N15P-GX-B-A2) Upon arrival it really did look pristine. I chose this GTX 860M because I don't want to deal with old cards pulled from a Dell machine. Polaris cards are harder to source and all of them are a hit or a miss. I went with the safest route: new Kepler card.
2. I tried to fit this MXM-B card into my MXM-A heatsink with 2 heat pipes. BAD IDEA folks. It's been warned in post #1. Heed that warning. Unigine Valley will not complete (system froze due to overheat). If you think you won't stress the GPU using benchmarks and might get away with it, still no-no, because 1-hr FaceTime call also froze the system. So I conceded and got the proper MXM-B heatsink with 3 heat pipes in, and glued some tiny copper fins there just for the lulz.
3. The grinding process and ROM installation has been covered several times, so I won't repeat that here. Follow the instructions. For GTX 860M specific walkthrough, read this post by @pappl
4. If all goes well, you'll have a functioning system. Set the fan control using Macs Fan Control. Next, fix the backlight stepping as detailed by @nikey22 on the same post you downloaded his ROM. Tip: when looking up the display ID in SysPref, you'll find "00009CD6" in mmod field. It's "9CD6" part you want. When you try to search the Info.plist, this will match up with "F10T9cd6". I scratched my head for quite a while on this disparity.
5. Assuming you have all the fundamentals done, using High Sierra, try stressing the system with Unigine Valley and Geekbench Compute. If everything is solid, you're good to go. So I did that and uploaded the result to the Google Spreadsheet.
6. Now the fun part: to move your system to either Mojave or Catalina or Big Sur. Advice: back up your fully functional High Sierra with that new shiny card of yours first. I did so using Carbon Copy Cloner.
6.1 For Mojave:
6.1.1 Download @dosdude1 Mojave Patcher, follow the instruction detailed by him. Create a Mojave install disk using the patcher. Then reboot into Mojave installer. Install it.
6.1.2 Once installed, reboot, press Opt, and once again boot Mojave install disk, and select "macOS Post-Install". Select iMac 11,3 and uncheck Legacy Video Card patch. Rebuild caches and reboot.
6.1.3 You might need to press Opt to select your primary system at this point. Don't worry.
6.1.4 Once fully greeted by Mojave, dosdude patcher will automatically launch Patch Updater. Update everything including the fix to allow you to download the supplemental update, install it to bring Mojave to build 18G7016. Patch Updater will ask you to repatch the system, follow that advice.
6.1.5 Reboot into Recovery Partition again, disable SIP, and reboot
6.1.6 Re-fix backlight stepping in the same way as step 4. You'll now have another AppleBacklight.kext. Don't confuse it with the High Sierra version. Then download "10.14.6 2020-003 18G5033 AppleGraphicsControl.kext" from this post. Make sure to not get the Catalina one.
6.1.7 Drag and drop both kexts into Kext Utility and reboot. Everything should be working including native brightness control with proper stepping. All the jazz without using Open Core/Catalina Loader.
I navigated through the lack of GPU Die Temp reading with Bootcamp. Windows 10 will read GPU temp just fine. So I carefully noted how GPU Heatsink temp and GPU Die temp correlate under idle and under repeated stress, i.e. consecutive Unigine Valley. With that correlation in mind (and the confidence that GPU Die isn't roasting itself in there while the heatsink is just chilling out), I set my Macs Fan Control ramp rate accordingly. Done!
6.2 For Catalina
6.2.1 Catalina went off to a bad start for me. I couldn't create a working install disk despite using the very same external hard drive that successfully housed Mojave Install disk. The Catalina Patcher would say that the disk was successfully created, but upon booting into it, I always got prohibitory sign (circle with a slash). This is despite me using gibMacOS to fetch 10.15.7 (19H15) and build the installer from there. Using built-in fetch function of the Patcher failed to start in the same way.
6.2.2 So I just went straight to directly install Catalina over Mojave, by modifying the Post-Install app plist to disable automatic legacy video mod. That went through just fine.
6.2.3 Then I used CatalinaOTAswufix app to update the system to 19H505. Only to realise that brightness adjustment doesn't work. (This is detailed in post #1, before anyone bashes me for not reading)
6.2.4 By updating the system without having a bootable Catalina install disk from 6.2.1, I can't repatch the system too (I have no sound, and probably some more things didn't work), and 0.6.3 Open Core doesn't seem to work with this build… (I could boot it with OC but it didn't bring back brightness control, or GPU temp monitor)
6.2.5 At this point I realised that I've come to a dead end, and also realised that Catalina really does need Open Core to enable brightness control, unlike Mojave which can get away without. All software solutions will still have the display blasting at full power, and generate significant heat. So either I have to have a USB stick plugged in at all times and select macOS every time I turn on the computer, or operate a radiator on my desktop. Neither of which sounds appealing for a machine that I use everyday for everything. It's been my daily driver for 11 years and will continue to be. For my use case, stability and native compatibility are paramount. For this reason, I reverted back to Mojave 10.14.6
The main reason I chose to upgrade the graphics card in the first place is to keep up with new softwares. Most apps are now requiring Mojave or above, including Spark (mail), Lightroom, DaVinci 17, and MS Office, just to name a few. For this reason I'm perfectly happy to stay on Mojave, for now at least.
Hopefully my write up helps someone!
First, I'd like to thank all excellent people who made this possible, especially @dosdude1 @nikey22 @highvoltage12v @Ausdauersportler
I'll outline what I did here, in case anyone has the same setup as me (iMac 11,3 + GTX 860M, but I'd assume any other ++ Kepler cards too). I think it'd help that subgroup of people, because in this thread we're working with so many combinations that at times I had 10 tabs opened and still felt fuzzy about what to do next.
1. Found a refurbished unit of GTX 860M 2GB on eBay. (N15P-GX-B-A2) Upon arrival it really did look pristine. I chose this GTX 860M because I don't want to deal with old cards pulled from a Dell machine. Polaris cards are harder to source and all of them are a hit or a miss. I went with the safest route: new Kepler card.
2. I tried to fit this MXM-B card into my MXM-A heatsink with 2 heat pipes. BAD IDEA folks. It's been warned in post #1. Heed that warning. Unigine Valley will not complete (system froze due to overheat). If you think you won't stress the GPU using benchmarks and might get away with it, still no-no, because 1-hr FaceTime call also froze the system. So I conceded and got the proper MXM-B heatsink with 3 heat pipes in, and glued some tiny copper fins there just for the lulz.
3. The grinding process and ROM installation has been covered several times, so I won't repeat that here. Follow the instructions. For GTX 860M specific walkthrough, read this post by @pappl
4. If all goes well, you'll have a functioning system. Set the fan control using Macs Fan Control. Next, fix the backlight stepping as detailed by @nikey22 on the same post you downloaded his ROM. Tip: when looking up the display ID in SysPref, you'll find "00009CD6" in mmod field. It's "9CD6" part you want. When you try to search the Info.plist, this will match up with "F10T9cd6". I scratched my head for quite a while on this disparity.
5. Assuming you have all the fundamentals done, using High Sierra, try stressing the system with Unigine Valley and Geekbench Compute. If everything is solid, you're good to go. So I did that and uploaded the result to the Google Spreadsheet.
6. Now the fun part: to move your system to either Mojave or Catalina or Big Sur. Advice: back up your fully functional High Sierra with that new shiny card of yours first. I did so using Carbon Copy Cloner.
6.1 For Mojave:
6.1.1 Download @dosdude1 Mojave Patcher, follow the instruction detailed by him. Create a Mojave install disk using the patcher. Then reboot into Mojave installer. Install it.
6.1.2 Once installed, reboot, press Opt, and once again boot Mojave install disk, and select "macOS Post-Install". Select iMac 11,3 and uncheck Legacy Video Card patch. Rebuild caches and reboot.
6.1.3 You might need to press Opt to select your primary system at this point. Don't worry.
6.1.4 Once fully greeted by Mojave, dosdude patcher will automatically launch Patch Updater. Update everything including the fix to allow you to download the supplemental update, install it to bring Mojave to build 18G7016. Patch Updater will ask you to repatch the system, follow that advice.
6.1.5 Reboot into Recovery Partition again, disable SIP, and reboot
6.1.6 Re-fix backlight stepping in the same way as step 4. You'll now have another AppleBacklight.kext. Don't confuse it with the High Sierra version. Then download "10.14.6 2020-003 18G5033 AppleGraphicsControl.kext" from this post. Make sure to not get the Catalina one.
6.1.7 Drag and drop both kexts into Kext Utility and reboot. Everything should be working including native brightness control with proper stepping. All the jazz without using Open Core/Catalina Loader.
I navigated through the lack of GPU Die Temp reading with Bootcamp. Windows 10 will read GPU temp just fine. So I carefully noted how GPU Heatsink temp and GPU Die temp correlate under idle and under repeated stress, i.e. consecutive Unigine Valley. With that correlation in mind (and the confidence that GPU Die isn't roasting itself in there while the heatsink is just chilling out), I set my Macs Fan Control ramp rate accordingly. Done!
6.2 For Catalina
6.2.1 Catalina went off to a bad start for me. I couldn't create a working install disk despite using the very same external hard drive that successfully housed Mojave Install disk. The Catalina Patcher would say that the disk was successfully created, but upon booting into it, I always got prohibitory sign (circle with a slash). This is despite me using gibMacOS to fetch 10.15.7 (19H15) and build the installer from there. Using built-in fetch function of the Patcher failed to start in the same way.
6.2.2 So I just went straight to directly install Catalina over Mojave, by modifying the Post-Install app plist to disable automatic legacy video mod. That went through just fine.
6.2.3 Then I used CatalinaOTAswufix app to update the system to 19H505. Only to realise that brightness adjustment doesn't work. (This is detailed in post #1, before anyone bashes me for not reading)
6.2.4 By updating the system without having a bootable Catalina install disk from 6.2.1, I can't repatch the system too (I have no sound, and probably some more things didn't work), and 0.6.3 Open Core doesn't seem to work with this build… (I could boot it with OC but it didn't bring back brightness control, or GPU temp monitor)
6.2.5 At this point I realised that I've come to a dead end, and also realised that Catalina really does need Open Core to enable brightness control, unlike Mojave which can get away without. All software solutions will still have the display blasting at full power, and generate significant heat. So either I have to have a USB stick plugged in at all times and select macOS every time I turn on the computer, or operate a radiator on my desktop. Neither of which sounds appealing for a machine that I use everyday for everything. It's been my daily driver for 11 years and will continue to be. For my use case, stability and native compatibility are paramount. For this reason, I reverted back to Mojave 10.14.6
The main reason I chose to upgrade the graphics card in the first place is to keep up with new softwares. Most apps are now requiring Mojave or above, including Spark (mail), Lightroom, DaVinci 17, and MS Office, just to name a few. For this reason I'm perfectly happy to stay on Mojave, for now at least.
Hopefully my write up helps someone!
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debe ingresar arrancando con alt al sistema big sur y luego en las preferencias del sistema debe decir apfs boot o una opción como en catalina y ahí se soluciona su problema que comienza con pantalla negra
"Ausdauersportler" thank you very much !
Bios loaded, iMac included, all right ! New GPU 6970m works !Thank you.
Check properties of each Card (gpu freq, vram freq, vram type, TDP) and if they are the exactly same, maybe ....but i think the ROM will give You a mismatch error when flashing. Just use the list of the 1st post, if You insist using any Card not listed there that works, You are on your own.
No one is a Seer here. As said in first post, buying old worn Kepler cards (and AMD cards as well) have its own risk of failure. We also can't predict which combination of GPU and iMac will work. AMD cards, while newer, are difficult to source and seem to be more picky with the host. iMac 2011 also doesn't seem to like many AMD cards but again unpredictable. iMac 2010 seems more forgiving but then mine rejects the common Dell WX4150 but not the HP version. You have to try to actually see whether it works or not. We cannot diagnose from the look to reassure your decision.
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Agree with ezugaru. IF the vBIOS is cross-flashable between K4100m and K4000m, won't you think our developers would have listed it there in the 1st post table instead of making an empty entry ?
You are damm right. I just thought about it, sorry didn't want to make you mad.
Back to my topic, i have some last questions. What do the experts think, is it worth it to give an old Alienware or something similar machine a try testing my 780M in there?
When it's working flash my card in Windows or Linux and then put it back in my imac or will my mac never ever detect this 780M? (Uptil now no detection in the mac, no second LED and bootnoice).
Thanks a bunch.
If you can get hold of a PC notebook to test it and flash it, why not try it then ?
So, if the 2nd LED is not lighted, you may need to check for short-circuit of the GPU with the heatsink that prevents your iMac from booting.
Read post #1 - hardware problems section and please check your hardware without the failing GPU. Everything you need is there.
Have your iMac received the latest BootROM EFI update from High Sierra ?Hello! I just completed my iMac 2010 27" upgrade from HD5670 to GTX 860M, now running Mojave 10.14.6 (18G7016) for reasons I'll detail below.
First, I'd like to thank all excellent people who made this possible, especially @dosdude1 @nikey22 @highvoltage12v @Ausdauersportler
I'll outline what I did here, in case anyone has the same setup as me (iMac 11,3 + GTX 860M, but I'd assume any other ++ Kepler cards too). I think it'd help that subgroup of people, because in this thread we're working with so many combinations that at times I have 10 tabs opened and still felt fuzzy about what to do next.
1. Found a refurbished unit of GTX 860M 2GB on eBay. (N15P-GX-B-A2) Upon arrival it really did look pristine. I chose this GTX 860M because I don't want to deal with old cards pulled from a Dell machine. Polaris cards are harder to source and all of them are a hit or a miss. I went with the safest route: new Kepler card.
2. I tried to fit this MXM-B card into my MXM-A heatsink with 2 heat pipes. BAD IDEA folks. It's been warned in post #1. Heed that warning. Unigine Valley will not complete (system froze due to overheat). If you think you won't stress the GPU using benchmarks and might get away with it, still no-no, because 1-hr FaceTime call also froze the system. So I conceded and got the proper MXM-B heatsink with 3 heat pipes in, and glued some tiny copper fins there just for the lulz.
3. The grinding process and ROM installation has been covered several times, so I won't repeat that here. Follow the instructions. For GTX 860M specific walkthrough, read this post by @pappl
4. If all goes well, you'll have a functioning system. Set the fan control using Macs Fan Control. Next, fix the backlight stepping as detailed by @nikey22 on the same post you downloaded his ROM. Tip: when looking up the display ID in SysPref, you'll find "00009CD6" in mmod field. It's "9CD6" part you want. When you try to search the Info.plist, this will match up with "F10T9cd6". I scratched my head for quite a while on this disparity.
5. Assuming you have all the fundamentals done, using High Sierra, try stressing the system with Unigine Valley and Geekbench Compute. If everything is solid, you're good to go. So I did that and uploaded the result to the Google Spreadsheet.
6. Now the fun part: to move your system to either Mojave or Catalina or Big Sur. Advice: back up your fully functional High Sierra with that new shiny card of yours first. I did so using Carbon Copy Cloner.
6.1 For Mojave:
6.1.1 Download @dosdude1 Mojave Patcher, follow the instruction detailed by him. Create a Mojave install disk using the patcher. Then reboot into Mojave installer. Install it.
6.1.2 Once installed, reboot, press Opt, and once again boot Mojave install disk, and select "macOS Post-Install". Select iMac 11,3 and uncheck Legacy Video Card patch. Rebuild caches and reboot.
6.1.3 You might need to press Opt to select your primary system at this point. Don't worry.
6.1.4 Once fully greeted by Mojave, dosdude patcher will automatically launch Patch Updater. Update everything including the fix to allow you to download the supplemental update, install it to bring Mojave to build 18G7016. Patch Updater will ask you to repatch the system, follow that advice.
6.1.5 Reboot into Recovery Partition again, disable SIP, and reboot
6.1.6 Re-fix backlight stepping in the same way as step 4. You'll now have another AppleBacklight.kext. Don't confuse it with the High Sierra version. Then download "10.14.6 2020-003 18G5033 AppleGraphicsControl.kext" from this post. Make sure to not get the Catalina one.
6.1.7 Drag and drop both kexts into Kext Utility and reboot. Everything should be working including native brightness control with proper stepping. All the jazz without using Open Core/Catalina Loader.
6.2 For Catalina
6.2.1 Catalina went off to a bad start for me. I couldn't create a working install disk despite using the very same external hard drive that successfully housed Mojave Install disk. The Catalina Patcher would say that the disk was successfully created, but upon booting into it, I always got prohibitory sign (circle with a slash). This is despite me using gibMacOS to fetch 10.15.7 (19H15) and build the installer from there. Using built-in fetch function of the Patcher failed to start in the same way.
6.2.2 So I just went straight to directly install Catalina over Mojave, by modifying the Post-Install app plist to disable automatic legacy video mod. That went through just fine.
6.2.3 Then I used CatalinaOTAswufix app to update the system to 19H505. Only to realise that brightness adjustment doesn't work. (This is detailed in post #1, before anyone bashes me for not reading)
6.2.4 By updating the system without having a bootable Catalina install disk from 6.2.1, I can't repatch the system too (I have no sound, and probably some more things didn't work), and 0.6.3 Open Core doesn't seem to work with this build… (I could boot it with OC but it didn't bring back brightness control, or GPU temp monitor)
6.2.5 At this point I realised that I've come to a dead end, and also realised that Catalina really does need Open Core to enable brightness control, unlike Mojave which can get away without. All software solutions will still have the display blasting at full power, and generate significant heat. So either I have to have a USB stick plugged in at all times and select macOS every time I turn on the computer, or operate a radiator on my desktop. Neither of which sounds appealing for a machine that I use everyday for everything. It's been my daily driver for 11 years and will continue to be. For my use case, stability and native compatibility are paramount. For this reason, I reverted back to Mojave 10.14.6
The main reason I chose to upgrade the graphics card in the first place is to keep up with new softwares. Most apps are now requiring Mojave or above, including Spark (mail), Lightroom, DaVinci 17, and MS Office, just to name a few. For this reason I'm perfectly happy to stay on Mojave, for now at least.
Hopefully my write up helps someone!
Have you disable SIP to try to boot from the Catalina Install prepared from DosDude1's Catalina Patcher ?
If you can run the Post-Install app, why can't you patch your new system ? I am confused ...
And usually that will also get installed in the Utility folder for secondary patching.
My experience is that there will be no sound if SIP is enabled.
Yes. BootROM 99.0.0.0.0
Haven't tried this one.
The Catalina Patcher, when installed directly on top of existing macOS, does this automatically at the end of the install process. When choosing this route, if I try to uncheck "Automatically apply post-install patches", the Patcher warns that "there's no way to do this later on, would you really like to proceed?"
I had sound with 19H15, because it came directly off automatic post-install patching. Not with 19H505 though. When I tried to use Post-install app that resides within Catalina Patcher to patch 19H505, it gave me nondescript error that it couldn't patch. After reading @Ausdauersportler 's experience with 19H505 that "Big Sur is easier than this", I concur. I gave up. lol
I had to reboot into the USB patcher (made one for this purpose) because the patching did not work. Normally one can modify the plist to have the correct patches applied when choosing the „install to this machine“ mode - and I have such patched @dosdude1 patchers ready to used - but this time it refuses to work unless I called the post install patches option from the USB installer and let it the caches rebuild, too.
After that all seems to work fine.
19H505 is still beta, 19H114 is latest official one and can be installed using opencore with the VMware settings. Had less trouble going this route.
Yeah in hindsight I shouldn't be too adventurous with my newly made Hackintosh-lite. And I failed to create an install disk too. Still the fact remains that Catalina, regardless of build, requires OpenCore USB stick for native brightness control or software dimming of the screen. I prefer neither for a daily driver.
I purchased a nVidia K1100m claimed to be taken out a Dell laptop.
As it still has the X-clamp attached, could you please give me some advice/caution when assembling it to iMac GPU heatsink?
1. Drill bigger holes and use it at where it is.
2. Remove the x-clamp: Heat it up a little bit and apply some force to remove, or do I need to drill it as well?
Thank you.
Picture attached.
Just come by a cheap offer and plan to use it as experiments.
The card prevented my HP 800G1 USDT from booting,
so I guess I would have to use the CH341a clip or the directly on the iMac with Linux USB.
I will try the MS DOS autoexect approach to see if it ever work.
As it still has the X-clamp attached, could you please give me some advice/caution when assembling it to iMac GPU heatsink?
1. Drill bigger holes and use it at where it is.
2. Remove the x-clamp: Heat it up a little bit and apply some force to remove, or do I need to drill it as well?
Thank you.
Picture attached.
Just come by a cheap offer and plan to use it as experiments.
The card prevented my HP 800G1 USDT from booting,
so I guess I would have to use the CH341a clip or the directly on the iMac with Linux USB.
I will try the MS DOS autoexect approach to see if it ever work.
Found it, thank you.
A: For an MXM-A swap (the shorter/less power draw cards) there are no modifications that are needed for the heatsink on both the 21.5" and 27" model iMacs. The X-clamp still needs be removed from the back of the card and have the screw posts drilled or tapped out in order to fit the heatsink's screws. Separate the X-Clamp using a hair dryer before drilling or tapping - it is just glued to the board. Skipping this step can fry or damage your card. If you've cleaned your heatsink, be sure to re-apply thermal pads around the GPU VRAM to prevent contact with the bare metal of the heatsink. Use electrical tape to isolate card components from the sink! Watch closely after installing the card. Take a look at the attached pictures of this post!
I used OC for month with my first K1100M and K2100M and now for nearly a 7 month using the AMD cards (including spoofing and several OTA upgrades now). This is really a save tool unless you do nasty things yourself (OTA). But I wrote this so often: Save you firmware and have CH341A ready to use.
The Nvidia config do not include any spoofing and are IMHO completely save. Running a 27“ without brightness control just burns you expensive LCD to death over time. Wonder if this has not been mentioned in the 1st post.