** NVIDIA Quadro K4000M Mac Edition ROM **
Genuine Native Boot Screen & Brightness Control
I've tested and put together the following ROM for the
NVIDIA Quadro K4000M which will allow:
Genuine native brightness control
Genuine ‘gray’ early-boot screen
Pre-installation Requirements:
- iMac12,2 (27-inch Mid 2011) Mac-942B59F58194171B (Tested machine)
- BootROM:
87.0.0.0.0. Please use High Sierra to update your BootROM to latest version.
- GPU varient: N14E-Q3-A2
- GPU VRAM:
I've made sure that the rom will report the correct size of vram this time:
4096MB. Please note, that there are cards that have the SAMSUNG vram chips, I do not know if they will work or not, you will have to tell me if you chose to purchase a SAMSUNG based card. I will update this post with any success or failures. Looking at the latencies table, I see entries for SAMSUNG ram there so I am guessing it will work.
I've tested it on a Windows 7 partition installation and works fine with Nvidia Quadro Driver version: 377.11 and BootCamp installtion: 5.0.5033
The vbios timings are near stock, I didn't want to adjust too much until we have more people using it. Feel free to adjust using Kepler Bios Tweaker and I will update the ROM on this post to reflect stable overclocks.
Post-installation Requirements:
Brightness Control Stepping Mod:
-Turn computer on, hold down Command(⌘)-R
-Choose Utilities > Terminal
-Enter:
csrutil disable
-
MacOS Catalina: requires you to make root writeable:
sudo mount -uw /
-Reboot
-Download and open 'Kext Utility v2.6.6'
-Navigate to S/L/E (System/Library/Extensions)
-Copy "AppleBacklight.kext" to Desktop
-Edit:
AppleBacklight.kext/Contents/Info.plist
-Scroll down to:
IOKitPersonalities > AppleIntelPanelA > ApplePanels
-There you find several Apple LCD profiles.
-For the iMac 2011 27" machine locate:
Code:
<key>F10Ta007</key>
<data>
ABEABgALABQAHAAnADMAPwBOAFwAZwBzAIEAkQClAL8A2wD/
</data>
-Change the <data> section to:
ABEAAgA3AF8AigCzAOsBJAFnAakB1AIJAlQCogL4A00DlgRpBGk=
-Drag your modded kext into Kext Utility, allow it correct permissions
-Applebacklight.kext.bak folder will be created
-Reboot
The above data pattern will allow for a wider span of steppings for the brightness control and utilizes more of the capacity of the HD3000. If you have a different machine, your panel ID can be found by going to
System Preferences > Displays > Color > Open Profile > mmod
Caveats post-install/Bugs:
The EFI rom unfortunately is based on a very old implementation of Tianocore, so a 16bit resolution glitch of UGA_DRAW_PROTOCOL is still present until I find a way to reprogram that. I'm loading the EFI module externally in a shell now to see why the EDID information is not being extracted properly.
Temporary solution: activate a sleep cycle and return, this should now clear the issue.
As stated previously these cards are based on a WSON flash package and therefore are much more difficult to recover from a bad flash. Please take precautions and verify flashing before rebooting.
Verified Installations:
@Fastord - K4000M, Samsung vram, original vbios: 80.04.5A.00.02 4/7/2021
"
insanely great!"
-Steve Jobs
