iM 4,1-14,4 2011 iMac Graphics Card Upgrade

[jay508]

View attachment 1775550

Hello everyone,

I noticed there are still a few members that have K1000M cards around.

I've put together this K1000M rom to enable Brightness control. You will still need to use Opencore to do the ACPI injections, but at least we have a way to control brightness on these older cards now. Just another option.

Vram support:
- ? (will check)

Bootloader/OS support:
Catalina Loader, High Sierra 10.13.6 (tested)

Machine support:
iMac 12,1 ( 21.5-inch Mid 2011) Mac-942B5BF58194151B
iMac 11,2 ( 21.5-inch Mid 2010) Mac-F2238AC8
iMac 11,1 (27-inch Late 2009) Mac-F2268DAE
iMac 11,3 (27-inch Mid 2010) Mac- F2238BAE
iMac12,2 (27-inch Mid 2011) Mac-942B59F58194171B (tested)

Enjoy!

Hi @nikey22
Tested K1000M_0C.rom, macOS 10.13.6 10.15.7 has system brightness which is great, add registration in Windows 7 Windows 10 system just like k2100m k1100m.
EnableBrightnessControl to 1
RMBrightnessControlFlags to 0x00000400 (1024)
Still no system brightness adjustment, how do I set this, thanks

 

[rodolfo.araujo]

Hi all! Upgraded my 21 inch 2011 iMac to BigSur using OCLP following the patcher guide. Everything went smoothly and in a few minutes had my 11.4 version working.

Brightness control does not work anymore (it worked using OC [not OCLP] in a previous HS and Catalina install). Reading OCLP troubleshooting I can't find why it is not working anymore but can find the recommendation to install Brightness Slider app.

Am I missing something? Can I help the devs somehow to enable BC on this particular model (iMac12,1 i7 2,8GHz 8GB RAM). I note that system firmware version reads 9999.999.999.999.999 and SMC version reads 9.9999 (I suppose its a OCLP modification).

Thanks.

EDIT: rebuilt the OCLP with Nvidia GPU as a forced selection on Advanced settings and now BC works. Thanks!

 

[Ausdauersportler]

Hi all! Upgraded my 21 inch 2011 iMac to BigSur using OCLP following the patcher guide. Everything went smoothly and in a few minutes had my 11.4 version working.

Brightness control does not work anymore (it worked using OC [not OCLP] in a previous HS and Catalina install). Reading OCLP troubleshooting I can't find why it is not working anymore but can find the recommendation to install Brightness Slider app.

Am I missing something? Can I help the devs somehow to enable BC on this particular model (iMac12,1 i7 2,8GHz 8GB RAM). I note that system firmware version reads 9999.999.999.999.999 and SMC version reads 9.9999 (I suppose its a OCLP modification).

Thanks.

EDIT: rebuilt the OCLP with Nvidia GPU as a forced selection on Advanced settings and now BC works. Thanks!

Normally the OCLP app should auto detect the installed GPU and adds the needed extensions and settings to provide brightness control. If you can repeat this issue please report it. Use the latest official release (0.1.6).

 

[DerTschnig]

Problem iMac 27" 2011 new GPU - NVIDIA Quadro K3100M 4GB

Hi guys, Hi @nikey22

The iMac turns on normally and also start up (Big Sur (with OpenCore EFI) or High Sierra (original EFI)).
Everything works fine (brightness control, boot menu and boot screen).
But when I shut down the iMac and want to turn it on again, it does not respond at all! It simply will not turn on again. Only when I disconnect it from the power supply and wait a bit, it can be started again with a little luck. It was tested with Big Sur and High Sierra, always the same phenomenon!
With the original GPU everything is working perfectly.

When I run the iMac with Big Sur, I use the attached OpenCore EFI.
Can someone maybe check my EFI?
Does anyone have a tip for me or does anyone have the same problem?

Thanks

 

[erkanss12]

Hello guys.
i have problem with colors (a1312-k3100m)

 

[Ausdauersportler]

Hello guys.
i have problem with colors (a1312-k3100m)
View attachment 1792198

Color gradient problem, known issue, known solution - you will find it searching the first post.

 

[LegoNickD]

I want to get a feature like TDM on my 2010 27" with a wx7100. High Sierra won't boot, and even if it did, having to keep a second partition and reboot every time I wanted to use a Pi or my Switch on the screen would get annoying fast. I have 2 main ideas for this and want to know what you guys think about them.
1. Use a pcie riser and multiplexer to keep the airport card, add usb 3 (like KennyW has), and add a high quality pcie capture card. However this is 3 devices all sharing the bandwidth of one. To me this seems like it would likely cause issues trying to display a minimally (if at all) compressed 1440p image with as little delay as possible. I do not think this would work well but I do think this is possible.
2. Use a separate screen driver board (like This one (seems nicer) or This one) and connect it to a DP switch with one input connected to the iMac's DP out, and the other to whatever I want. This way seems better to me, however, I have many questions about this method:

• Do these driver boards support CEC for brightness control with apps like MonitorControl since native brightness will surely be lost?
• Will the iMac be aware it no longer has an internal display, or will it behave as though it now has 2 displays with the ghost internal screen no longer accessible?
• Will the display register as still the internal display as if nothing is wrong (I doubt this but you never know)?
• Do these driver boards have an ugly OSD that pops up on startup/sleep/shutdown?
• Will there even be room for these boards without removing the iMac guts out of the inside?

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

• Do these driver boards support CEC for brightness control with apps like MonitorControl since native brightness will surely be lost?

These boards come with their own backlight board and control keys. If you can hack into the chips on their control board to control it from another machine, then yes, you can do brightness control remotely. Otherwise, just press the buttons on the 5 buttons keyboards that come with them.

• Will the iMac be aware it no longer has an internal display, or will it behave as though it now has 2 displays with the ghost internal screen no longer accessible?

Yes, the iMac will be aware when you disconnect the flat eDP cable, unless your DP switch can simulate a dummy monitor. If the iMac recognizes that it's no longer connected to the internal screen, it will shutdown the LCD backlight power board.

• Will the display register as still the internal display as if nothing is wrong (I doubt this but you never know)?

It depends on how your DP switch operate.

• Do these driver boards have an ugly OSD that pops up on startup/sleep/shutdown?
• Will there even be room for these boards without removing the iMac guts out of the inside?

You have already opened your iMac when you replaced the WX7100.
You can use the spaces allocated to the HDD and ODD, if you can trim down the SSD case and tuck it some where inside the iMac case.

 

[mikevoice]

Hello everybody. I have an iMac 2010 with Nvidia K1100m. Mac OS Big Sur is installed. The brightness control works, but I am missing the display brightness. 60-70% of the maximum. How can you increase the brightness?
What to edit in config.plist ?

 

[m0bil]

I just reinstalled EFI Windows 10 but when I went to reboot the volume couldn't be found (almost like it installed as BIOS) so I pulled my other drive and reinstalled again. Then I booted TeamViewer (TV) and then let Windows do it's thing. Screen went black like it has been so I opened up device manager from TV and it showed GTX 780m error 43. I ran windows updates and rebooted. Still nothing at first, then another reboot happened (blue updating popped up), and another. Finally after 3 or 4 restarts the image showed on screen! Seems to be working now, just installed the cirrus driver and have that working as well. Very strange. I think it was just a matter of waiting, overall took about 5 minutes for the installer to do it's thing updating after the driver install. Very strange. Now it does take around 30 seconds on each boot for video to show up as @m0bil said.

View attachment 1791637
View attachment 1791642

Great you got that working. Yep, driver install sometimes goes black screen and you have to wait on the black screen too. Maybe there's some registry entries to force display detection and avoid the 30s delay on startup, that's something I have pending to look up.
If you feel adventurous or need a more modern driver with Vulkan capabilities, I wrote a small guide here on how to update drivers to latest version. The 780M has great performance under windows.

 

[G3llings]

Great you got that working. Yep, driver install sometimes goes black screen and you have to wait on the black screen too. Maybe there's some registry entries to force display detection and avoid the 30s delay on startup, that's something I have pending to look up.
If you feel adventurous or need a more modern driver with Vulkan capabilities, I wrote a small guide here on how to update drivers to latest version. The 780M has great performance under windows.

Thanks! I've done this before so no problem doing it since you provided the inf, that was the only problem I had before was trying to edit one myself to add the board ID. I have an m4000m that required this, I would really like to use that instead of the 780m but no boot screen compatability it was giving me 1050 ti desktop performance under windows and running much cooler than this 780m. I did play a couple games of rocket league on the 780m yesterday so it'll get me by for now. I have been working with @jay508 and he has changed the board ID on a few boards instead of creating a modified inf, allowing for using the unmodified drivers. Not sure if that is easy to do but it would allow for future updates more easily.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Hello everybody. I have an iMac 2010 with Nvidia K1100m. Mac OS Big Sur is installed. The brightness control works, but I am missing the display brightness. 60-70% of the maximum. How can you increase the brightness?
What to edit in config.plist ?

I used the Opencore Legacy Patcher, version 0.1.2.
Later versions may work, too. But I still use version 0.1.2 as it solved the max backlight level on my iMac 2009.

 

[Hirst102908]

so guys, I have a little gift for you to give back after such an incredible thread
hope you like it, the headaches to get it running were immens for me as a newb.

I couldn't stand it to use fckin windows to flash the cards and so I prepared this ~350mb drive

I created a Linux Live USB (based on grml.org) Thumb Drive with nvflash_linux and Nicks Bioses preloaded. and its booting by itself so you can work blind with a new unpatched nvidia card plugged in. Also, its starting a ssh daemon and using DHCP to get an IP so you can remote login

Steps

Download
14 days left to download, uploaded here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/cztz4xqj2sru9gj/2011_imac_usb.zip/file

mirror by NOTNICE, thnx: https://cloud.notnlce.com/index.php/s/xkJP34GD6a9WziE/download

latest updated Version by @The_Croupier (thnx!) Post: #13,624 > ---- Download here ---- <


Prepare USB Drive or SD Card
so, you take a small usb thumb drive, partition it with disk utility on a Mac: GPT + FAT32
and just unzip the files structure onto the drive, no dd or etcher or something. just copy paste it. folder structure see attached screenshot. (you can remove the .roms I downloaded and download itself if you want to be sure about the correct file size. I did not verify them at all. use/flash at your own risk please)

Test & Try
test your thumb drive with a more or less working GPU/ external Screen or just have faith in me

Swap Hardware
swap your GPU to NVIDIA and (!) disconnect every SSD/HDD, makes it easier to boot blindly from one USB or SD Card, connect the ETH Cable (!)

Find IP
let the iMac boot, everything is black, the boot loader is waiting 20s before booting, so give the whole process 1min time, then head over to your Router Page and find the right IP that the iMac got through DHCP

SSH to the iMac
now fire up your terminal on a Win/Mac/Linux Machine of your choice and ssh to your iMac with
ssh root@YOURIP
Password: flash
Confirm the ssh id with yes and you should be in your iMac

Working Directory
cd /lib/live/mount/medium/flash

read the RADME in there… I will enjoy my brand new k2000m in my 27" 2011 iMac with Catalina 10.15.3
… and because this is so easy, I rebuild it to a K1100M and flashed that also

(someone could write some fancy scripts but I thought its saver that everyone is doing it command by command and don't stop thinking and trusting some scripts)

I was able to log into my 2011 iMac, but the code didn't work... Please help!!!

 

[m0bil]

Thanks! I've done this before so no problem doing it since you provided the inf, that was the only problem I had before was trying to edit one myself to add the board ID. I have an m4000m that required this, I would really like to use that instead of the 780m but no boot screen compatability it was giving me 1050 ti desktop performance under windows and running much cooler than this 780m. I did play a couple games of rocket league on the 780m yesterday so it'll get me by for now. I have been working with @jay508 and he has changed the board ID on a few boards instead of creating a modified inf, allowing for using the unmodified drivers. Not sure if that is easy to do but it would allow for future updates more easily.
View attachment 1792493

If you need more cooling power for the 780M you can disconnect the odd temperature sensor cable, that will allow Macs Fan Control to speed up the ODD fan up to 3800 rpm instead of the 2500 rpm standard. I have it setup that way for very intensive windows gaming on the 780M.

 

[G3llings]

If you need more cooling power for the 780M you can disconnect the odd temperature sensor cable, that will allow Macs Fan Control to speed up the ODD fan up to 3800 rpm instead of the 2500 rpm standard. I have it setup that way for very intensive windows gaming on the 780M.

Thanks, it runs around 76c so not crazy hot, but the m4000m only got to shoot 61c and much higher performance.

 

[unclemiltie]

speaking of which... I asked this earlier but what is a good temp range for Macs Fan Control on the GPU heat sink? Right now I have mine set to 40-70C and the GPU (not heavily loaded) runs right about 50 but I do have a bit of fan noise. Should I allow it to get hotter?

 

[jay508]

Thanks! I've done this before so no problem doing it since you provided the inf, that was the only problem I had before was trying to edit one myself to add the board ID. I have an m4000m that required this, I would really like to use that instead of the 780m but no boot screen compatability it was giving me 1050 ti desktop performance under windows and running much cooler than this 780m. I did play a couple games of rocket league on the 780m yesterday so it'll get me by for now. I have been working with @jay508 and he has changed the board ID on a few boards instead of creating a modified inf, allowing for using the unmodified drivers. Not sure if that is easy to do but it would allow for future updates more easily.
View attachment 1792493

Check the private message sent to you to adjust the clock frequency of M3000M so that it can score the stress test properly Thanks

 

[m0bil]

Thanks, it runs around 76c so not crazy hot, but the m4000m only got to shoot 61c and much higher performance.

That's interesting, I was not aware you could use a Maxwell card on these macs with windows. Only thing you loose is boot screen ? How do you modify driver to use internal display on this cards ?

 

[nsr500rossi]

Sorry I can’t seem to post a new thread Any chance a mod could post this is a new thread please

Unfortunately I seem to have knocked off three chips from my Nividia k4100m

I have circled them in red

Would anyone know the part numbers …

I have someone who can easily replace them but struggling to find out what they actually are

 

[jay508]

That's interesting, I was not aware you could use a Maxwell card on these macs with windows. Only thing you loose is boot screen ? How do you modify driver to use internal display on this cards ?

M4000M VBiOS installation driver provided by @G3llings need to modify the inf, I modified the ID inside the VBiOS can now directly install the public version of the driver does not require any modification can be installed directly, now full load copy pressure test performance is normal heat than gtx780m gtx880m are much lower. Now is not used to start the screen did not use the brightness adjustment screen maximum brightness running screen is very harsh.

M3000M I used the same method to modify the ID directly install the public version of the driver does not need to be modified, but now the clock frequency can not boost the performance is not normal, the follow-up will be adjusted.

Start screen with the system screen brightness adjustment can assist in debugging tests if someone will modify.

My graphics card are HP brand new spare parts.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

[G3llings]

That's interesting, I was not aware you could use a Maxwell card on these macs with windows. Only thing you loose is boot screen ? How do you modify driver to use internal display on this cards ?

as @jay508 mentioned he was able to take my bios and adjust the board ID to install a standard driver, I haven't tested this. I used a modified .Inf file to allow the driver to install. The issue with Maxwell is that it is only compatible with up to high Sierra, and we have no boot screen even with opencore as far as I know. Makes dual booting complicated, I haven't tried with bootcamp. I have seen a success with a GTX 980m somewhere online, the m4000m is equivalent to 970m but higher memory bandwidth allows for slightly better performance.

 

[jay508]

as @jay508 mentioned he was able to take my bios and adjust the board ID to install a standard driver, I haven't tested this. I used a modified .Inf file to allow the driver to install. The issue with Maxwell is that it is only compatible with up to high Sierra, and we have no boot screen even with opencore as far as I know. Makes dual booting complicated, I haven't tried with bootcamp. I have seen a success with a GTX 980m somewhere online, the m4000m is equivalent to 970m but higher memory bandwidth allows for slightly better performance.

@G3llings Watch out for the private message I sent you.

 

[dfranetic]

Sorry I can’t seem to post a new thread Any chance a mod could post this is a new thread please

Unfortunately I seem to have knocked off three chips from my Nividia k4100m

I have circled them in red

Would anyone know the part numbers …

I have someone who can easily replace them but struggling to find out what they actually are

Take good note of top markings of surface mount components. Those two 3-pin missing components should be MOSFETs. (J1 top mark corresponds to BSS138L, I can't see the top mark of the second one, but I assume it is TR7, which corresponds to NTR2101P. They can probably be replaced with equivalents.) The small missing component is probably a resistor. (Presumably a 0R jumper in 0201 or 0402 package, but I cannot confirm. I don't have any NVIDIA cards to check - it is however highly likely that this component is the same on K3100M, K4100M and K5100M.)

 

[nsr500rossi]

Thank you

Very helpful...yes the other MOSFET is TR7

So now easy to find compatible components

My friend is an knows his electronics and will be repairing the board .. he is going to do some tracing to find out what the 0402 Is

Thanks for your help

Take good note of top markings of surface mount components. Those two 3-pin missing components should be MOSFETs. (J1 top mark corresponds to BSS138L, I can't see the top mark of the second one, but I assume it is TR7, which corresponds to NTR2101P. They can probably be replaced with equivalents.) The small missing component is probably a resistor. (Presumably a 0R jumper in 0201 or 0402 package, but I cannot confirm. I don't have any NVIDIA cards to check - it is however highly likely that this component is the same on K3100M, K4100M and K5100M.)

 

[m0bil]

as @jay508 mentioned he was able to take my bios and adjust the board ID to install a standard driver, I haven't tested this. I used a modified .Inf file to allow the driver to install. The issue with Maxwell is that it is only compatible with up to high Sierra, and we have no boot screen even with opencore as far as I know. Makes dual booting complicated, I haven't tried with bootcamp. I have seen a success with a GTX 980m somewhere online, the m4000m is equivalent to 970m but higher memory bandwidth allows for slightly better performance.

understood. Does brightness control work in windows ??

I see M4000M has like 30% more performance than a 780M and less heat dissipation, and can be found relatively cheap. Sounds like a good alternative for a windows-only setup.