Thanks once again for providing a calming, clear and concise answer; no doubts here
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iM 4,1-14,4 2011 iMac Graphics Card Upgrade
- Thread starter MichaelDT
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Thanks once again for providing a calming, clear and concise answer; no doubts here
Yes you use K5-Pro style paste on the VRAM. I believe Apple use similar paste on the stock GPU vram chips too, I have looked at the pads but no point changing something that’s tried and tested
On my desk is an iMac mid 2011 27 i7 3.4Ghz with a 6970M 2GB card running 10.13.6 (High Sierra). The card has failed, that's why I am here. I have no plans to move away from High Sierra.
At the moment I am planning on baking the failed 6970m GPU card but I am afraid I may see the card only fail again in the future.
Rather than baking the card I am considering a proper repair by purchasing a more recent GPU card that matches the 6970m in physical dimensions followed by booting from the Linux USB stick method and ssh'ing in to Flash.
The big problem I have is … which GPU for my case?
Yes, I have read all of page 1 and more. I would greatly appreciate a reply.
At the moment I am planning on baking the failed 6970m GPU card but I am afraid I may see the card only fail again in the future.
Rather than baking the card I am considering a proper repair by purchasing a more recent GPU card that matches the 6970m in physical dimensions followed by booting from the Linux USB stick method and ssh'ing in to Flash.
The big problem I have is … which GPU for my case?
Yes, I have read all of page 1 and more. I would greatly appreciate a reply.
Read Again, and again..........
As a side note I had good Luck with nVidia Quadro K1100m Video Graphics Card, however, you need to Read Again.
Good Luck!
Thanks for citing one card as a possibility. I appreciate the prompt reply and I guess I will have to read it yet again but thank you!
Basically you can pick every Nvidia card from the list starting with K2100M. This will offer the same performance.
No physical adjustments, just software (EDIT: OpenCore) to get brightness control with this card. Once installed you will never touch it again unless you change the hardware.
Other cards need grinding the sink, offer more performance and dig a deeper hole in your pocket.
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Hello, thank you kindly for the reply. Your answer appears to cover my goal and needs, a like for like in terms if the physical dimensions with no need to alter the heat sink with the 3 copper pipes and I don't want or need to go beyond High Sierra 10.13.6. As @jazo97 pointed out, read read and read some more on the subject — and I will.
As per page 1 spoilers, ok I will investigate this carefully.
- Brighness level: Solution is linked here for all ++ cards and described by @nikey22 on each of his posts, again. People ignore it nevertheless.
- Brightness control with OpenCore: All + cards need OCLP or CL to enable brightness control!
Thank you ever so much for your reply, I truly appreciate it.
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Why would you want to stay with High Sierra? One of the main reasons to change the graphics card is to get Big Sur, which has the latest security updates.
i was talking about the amd radeon wich is really expensive, but rn i'm doing a cheap 27 imac, found one with a broken graphic card for 40€ with an i5 8gb of ram and 1tb hard drive, so i'm just gonna to maybe upgrade the cpu for a xeon for around 45€ and i've found a gtx 880m in mxm3 for no more than 60€ and i've found brand new crucial 16gb ram for 50€ so should be a nice build
Xeon upgrades on 2011 system do not really work out, mostly they break sleep of the macOS system. Stick with the few CPU's known to work unless you know what you get.
Exactly! Congratulations!
I just wish I could find such cheap pieces of hardware like you did.
But the dealers here are jumping on such chances faster than I could.
I went through the same decision process recently and settled on a K3100M to up the performance of the system and to give me the option to upgrade to Big Sur should I want to. I've not done it yet though.
First, the baking will work but not for long. That was my first "solution" to the problem but it only lasted about a month or so. But that is something that can get you going until you get all of the other stuff that you're going to need to do the swap. I also sent the GPU off to have it re-balled hoping that might do the trick. Again, it lasted a couple of months and then died again. The guy who did it said the real issue is the balls inside the package for the flip-chip mounting so unless you can find a new GPU chip the 6970 is probably not a good solution for you.
I bought the K3100M from an ebay seller who pre-flashes the GPU with the VBIOS from this forum. (as an aside, she flashed the wrong one and it wouldn't boot MacOS but it did boot the USB stick and I could see the screen so it was trivial to re-flash it. she was pretty apologetic and helped me through the process and made a note that she was not going to make that mistake again) Having the VBIOS pre-flashed made it pretty easy and the K3100M only cost me $125 to get my iMac back.
The K3100M requires that you grind away a bit of the heat sink but that's not really a huge problem if you have a Dremel. I do think that the ebay seller does sell the K1100 and K2100 pre-flashed but I have no experience with mounting those on the 6970M heat sink.
All in all, not a hugely complicated job. If you haven't already while you have it apart replace your hard disk with an SSD. (OWC also sells a kit that allows you to leave your HDD in there and add the SSD behind the optical disk but I opted just to swap it out) the performance difference on the machine is remarkable.
My only issue is that the system won't return from sleep. I've been told that I can entirely re-install High Sierra and that might fix it or the GPU may have some kind of fault that is causing this. I don't feel like chasing it down so I've just set the system to have the system never sleep. Some day if I find the time I might try to chase this one down but until then that works for me.
You're absolutely right, that is one of the benefits indeed but in truth I am really happy with High Sierra. The other perspective that I am considering in all of this is simplicity, going beyond High Sierra seems like an additional complexity that requires further study and I will dwell on that but my main goal at the moment is to either bake my 6970m which I know is not a real fix, hence my interest in just going for another card. Although widely documented as an ultimate fate for the 6000 series it leaves me with some reservations, namely which card can I have faith in for the long term.
So although the idea of moving beyond High Sierra is of course intriguing and more urgent as time goes by at this moment I am perhaps being overly cautious and I think that stems from all the options and caveats. The caveats appear to be rather minimal, there is the + and ++ footnotes and the potential mod to the 3 pipe heat sink for a few select cards. All these options and caveats make it difficult, for me anyway, to really think about the future prospect of installing anything beyond High Sierra even though I would love to even though High Sierra serves all my immediate needs but security is a key concern and of course browser support will become an acute issue as the OS ages.
In all honesty I would love to eventually go with a card that is currently sold and the "Spoiler: Table of Working (new) AMD Graphics Cards" with the word "new" in it suggests that these are contemporary cards or may "new" here means new solutions found. I don't find that clear.
But all in all you are right, especially about the Security Updates.
I am sorry for the long reply, I feel a little guilty about it because if memory serves me, one of the goals of this thread is to minimize as much as possible the kind of chatter I offered as it only lengthens this thread but I hope my long winded answer provides some invaluable but insightful perspective on where my head is at with all of this. Kudos to all the developers who are making all of this a reality, I am humbled by their efforts.
Remarkable story and experience. I actually do have the SSD OWC upgrade which was installed a few years ago. I have since swapped out the said OWC SSD drive to newer higher capacity non-OWC drive. I do have a rotational enterprise grade drive that from time to time monitors above 50°C which is not ideal for the drive itself but I have already been running MacsFanControl for ages to keep the innards as cool as possible but in hindsight I might swap this perfectly work rotational with a second SSD to push temperatures down further and it also helps if I ever chose to crank the computers loud speakers, something rotational drives don't like (audible noise - actually affects their performance).
But back to the GPU question, I will have to go through getting a card that could potentially deliver on the promise of going beyond High Sierra as it really does make sense.
The sleep issue is interesting as it has to typically do with PRAM and SMC. If you do a man pmset in the terminal) you will find sleep is one of its domains. That said the SMC chip has a role in power management and any sleep disorder would be tied to the SMC. With that said you could, if you haven't already, reset the SMC and perform a PRAM reset.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063 PRAM Reset
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295 SMC Reset (doesn't affect parameters in PRAM)
You could try those procedures but since you are running a GPU outside of the original Apple spec I can't predict if either or both will help but I would confirm these don't actually cause problems.
I also see that the table displays 3 ROMs for the K3100M but I don't understand why 3 ROMs are listed as ROM1 and ROM2 both lead to the same announcement page by @nikey22
| Card | BIOS links | Boot Screen | Brightness Control | 21.5/27/MXM | Heat Sink Mod | OGL | MET |
|---|
I did search for the K3100M and sleep/wake issues and didn't find anyone claiming this issue but my search was not exhaustive; however, I would consider preparing a volume with a clean install of High Sierra and before updating High Sierra on the new volume, test the sleep/wake issue. If it works follow-up with more OS updates and take notes on what update was applied and whether sleep works post updates. Run software update again and repeat the sleep test to see along which of the update increments sleep fails, if at all ever throughout the 10.13.6 update path as it might help the developers and just as importantly provide you with a concrete answer on your hunch that the OS needs to be reinstalled. You can install High Sierra over top itself with no harm done to your existing user account. You might have to only reinstall a few apps post OS reinstall as some app specific plists or kexts that would have been present in /Library or /System/Library would go missing as a result of the MacOS reinstall. You shouldn't experience any major disruption at all but I still advise on a Time Machine back up first to be safe.
Alternatively (still on the sleep issue), to avoid any red haring, disconnect all external devices and see if the sleep issue is reproducible. If not it might be an external device or cable. Connect back one device at a time and reproduce the sleep test. This will help isolate the device or cable affecting sleep.
The other thing you might try is to turn on remote login via the Sharing System Preferences and try to invoke a sleep via an ssh session. I don't know if under normal circumstances and ssh or shell invoked sleep would even make a difference under any circumstance but because we are dealing the a non-native GPU with best effort attempts with patches and the like we are really dealing with out of spec machines that might have some behavioral anomalies as a by product. pmset sleepnow from the shell will sleep your Mac. I don't know if the Mac cares about how it sleeps. I might be over thinking this. I can't see how sleeping from the menu or shell would differ but it doesn't hurt to try.
I guess the point here is that when troubleshooting an issue try to minimize the hardware config, hence physically detached external devices, leaving only those required such as mouse and kbd to learn if you can reach the desired outcome and whenever possible reduce the software configuration, so safe boot and test or a new user account and test or if all else fails a pristine MacOS install to test. You might also be able to simulate a clean MacOS software install for the sleep issue by booting into recovery or single user mode to test the sleep issue. Does it sleep and wake as expected in those modes if available?
Thank you for offering your experience once again, I greatly appreciate it.
PS the new user account to test sleep is invalid as sleep is system wide not user specific.
—Alex
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In fact there is a fourth ROM. You need to see what memory chips are on the graphics card. The ROM will depend on whether it is Hynix or Elpida.
Why don't you do a test where you install OCLP and then natively install Big Sur to see if sleep issue persists?
Performance difference between 2700k and 2600 is not that big.
If you ask me, stick with i7 2600 non k version for the 27” 2011 iMac.
Best and compatible option out there, also pricewise..
If there is a fourth ROM shouldn't page 1 be updated? @MichaelDT could you update page 1 as @herrdude claims a fourth ROM is available for the Quadro K3100M. @herrdude just to confirm, the fourth ROM relates to the Quadro K3100M correct? Thank you!
Have you counted the ROM versions linked yourself? Sometimes reading is better than writing.
You are welcome!
The iMac I have, an iMac mid 2011, i7 3.4GHz with a failed AMD 6970m was providing me two external monitors under High Sierra but as I continue to read page 1, only one external display is currently possible. I appreciate that ongoing efforts are even able to support one external display but in my case, having two external displays in addition to the built-in display was one of the most attractive features of this iMac in my opinion.
I am only curious to learn if there are any development plans to consider resolving the limitation of one external display. I understand and respect the countless number of hours that have been generously volunteered especially by developers here but I extend my gratitude to those YouTubers, bloggers including those who contributed their experiences and assistance to this thread. I am actually amazed at this entire effort. So I wanted to be clear that my question is not here to insinuate a pressure point on anyone, especially the developers who are doing all of this from their goodwill. it's merely a curiosity on my part and perhaps I speak for others as well.
***
As per:
Spoiler: Issues with Unsupported PC MXM Card (The Seven Problems)
Most - if not all - of these problems have been solved with the published BIOS versions.
Using a non Apple video card within an iMac will create these seven problems.
Despite having 2 miniDisplayPort outputs, the 27" 2011 iMac will only output to one external display. There is currently no fix or workaround for this.
***
Kind regards.
—Alex
I am only curious to learn if there are any development plans to consider resolving the limitation of one external display. I understand and respect the countless number of hours that have been generously volunteered especially by developers here but I extend my gratitude to those YouTubers, bloggers including those who contributed their experiences and assistance to this thread. I am actually amazed at this entire effort. So I wanted to be clear that my question is not here to insinuate a pressure point on anyone, especially the developers who are doing all of this from their goodwill. it's merely a curiosity on my part and perhaps I speak for others as well.
***
As per:
Spoiler: Issues with Unsupported PC MXM Card (The Seven Problems)
Most - if not all - of these problems have been solved with the published BIOS versions.
Using a non Apple video card within an iMac will create these seven problems.
- The loss of EFI boot screen;
- The loss of backlight control;
- You can only connect one external monitor to 27" iMacs;
Despite having 2 miniDisplayPort outputs, the 27" 2011 iMac will only output to one external display. There is currently no fix or workaround for this.
***
Kind regards.
—Alex
Since your do not plan to use your iMac with more modern macOS versions and you do not care about missing security upgrades how about buying a refurbished ATI 6970 or an thunderbolt dock which offers a second working display port even with the NVIDIA and (new) AMD cards listed. I would call the the original series of ATI/AMD cards used originally by Apple old.
And I found this about new BIOS versions on the first post, too (believe me, it is so tiresome to explain why there is no free ice cream after a free lunch)
Please do not harass the BIOS developers to go faster, release a particular BIOS, etc. Please do not clog up the thread with useless posts asking if your specific card will get a new BIOS.
Some other news on GPU upgrade:
Source:
iBoff RCC were able to create an adapter to extract the PCIe lanes from the MXM slot, allowing one to install nvme SSD and external GPU with an extender cable routed out the DVD slot.
Source:
iBoff RCC were able to create an adapter to extract the PCIe lanes from the MXM slot, allowing one to install nvme SSD and external GPU with an extender cable routed out the DVD slot.
As time goes by, as I learn more, I am on the fence regarding how I will deal with my failed GPU. So I am now in an evaluation mode. Thanks for the reply.
@Ausdauersportler has made an excellent suggestion considering your current needs (2 screens and keeping High Sierra). There is a ton of HD6970M available on Ebay. You can buy one and install it. Then when it dies, you can buy another one and install it, and so on.