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

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
austinsec said:
I was hoping it was plug and play,
Click to expand...
Before we need days to copy and paste the first post here piece by piece I would recommend you start reading the docs on this first post on page 1 of this thread before answering, again. It starts with a line "This is not a plug and play solution!".

Sorry, it is a major overhaul of your iMac and no short cuts are known (to me) other than asking a third party to do the job. Since we tried to document each step after a while of reading you will be able to do the job. Preparation is everything.
 
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I read it , i was hoping for a plug and play , I reballed in oven once and now deal after 3 years, (black screen)
just wanted a permanent fix with less work.
 
austinsec said:
I read it , i was hoping for a plug and play , I reballed in oven once and now deal after 3 years, (black screen)
just wanted a permanent fix with less work.
Click to expand...

It's even less trouble than plug and play if you are willing to pay. Kind of turn-key-project.
Just take your iMac to a local repair shop and show them this thread.
If you pay well enough, they'd sure know how to do it.
 
The one I have died , I just want a stable card that does not fail. wifes computer internet pictures, basic stuff.
 
austinsec said:
The one I have died , I just want a stable card that does not fail. wifes computer internet pictures, basic stuff.
Click to expand...

Between K1000m and K1100m, I would choose K1100m, it would run much cooler than K1000m.
Even with preflashed card, you still need some software hack (Opencore Legacy Patcher) to make it function 99% (boot screen + backlight control). There's no warranty that the card you purchased won't fail. But K1100m is a weak card and the probability it had been heavily tortured by a gamer is lower than other GTX card, that's all.
 
Nguyen Duc Hieu said:
Between K1000m and K1100m, I would choose K1100m, it would run much cooler than K1000m.
Even with preflashed card, you still need some software hack (Opencore Legacy Patcher) to make it function 99% (boot screen + backlight control). There's no warranty that the card you purchased won't fail. But K1100m is a weak card and the probability it had been heavily tortured by a gamer is lower than other GTX card, that's all.
Click to expand...

If you had all the choices of all cards what would you recommend, remember just a basic computer internet photos etc.
 
internetzel said:
You should first make sure that your iMac does still work, besides the presumably dead graphics card.
A first indicator would be the typcial Mac boot chime - which you don't mention to appear.
So you should first do a NVRAM/PRAM reset; just search the internet for how to do this.
After that NVRAM/PRAM reset you should hear the boot chime - if not, something makes your Mac crash even before being able to play that chime; you'll have to open your iMac and remove the graphics card in order to see whether that's the cause.
If you hear the boot chime with the graphics card removed (no need to reinstall the display for testing) then you may start to search for a replacement graphics card. Again, you might have to do the NVRAM/PRAM reset after removing the graphics card, in order to get the boot chime.
In case there's still no boot chime then it's up to you whether you want to continue investigating the problem on your own.
Click to expand...
Update:
So I did as I was told and did the NVRAM reset and the boot chime appeared twice. I just have a black screen, connectors were all ok. So I took the GPU out and it was clearly broken as its CPU wasn't even sitting correctly in its spot anymore. Lifted it off (possible without any force) and saw some melted and deformed pins... (don't know how this can happen though, overheating or defective cooler or something?)

With that out of the way I can order a new GPU and try to get that running!
 
Nguyen Duc Hieu said:
I would choose the small MXM card that came with the iMac, plug and play, hassle free.
For example: HD5670m, HD6770m.
Click to expand...
That does not seem to be an upgrade and it looks like many fail. Price is the same at best, I perfer the upgrade since I am replacing anyway.
 
LegoNickD said:
I made a bit of a discovery with my WX7100, if you add agdpmod=vit9696 to the boot args in oclp you can boot High Sierra without needing an external monitor! Yay! However, this will reverse the problem and make it so booting Big Sur will just result in a black screen once acceleration kicks in. I still need to mess around with some more WEG boot flags, but there is light at the end of the tunnel for likely all 2 people who suffer from this issue. If there is a way to have opencore only apply that boot flag to High Sierra then that would be an easy fix, but I don't think that's possible.

For those wondering why I am doing all this, I am trying to use High Sierra to get stable TDM since it doesn't work very well in Big Sur.
Click to expand...
Sometimes....

We used a patch with High Sierra and NVIDIA cards to achieve the same what the agdpmod=vit9696 can do with OpenCore.

So the solution will be to use the very same patch on your High Sierra and delete the agdpmod=vit9696 from OpenCore. It is listed on the post #1 in the upgrade section for Sierra and High Sierra, too.

Just deselect all additional extensions like AppleBacklightFix, WhateverGreen and Lilu (you have with OC) and the FakeSMC. This way only the AppleGraphicsControl (AGC) will be patched.

You can do the same manually after disabling SIP with OC and making root writable and sudo using this commands

Code: 
MYBOARD=`/usr/sbin/ioreg -l | grep board-id | awk -F\" '{ print $4 }' | grep Mac`
cd /Systems/Library/Extensions
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Add :IOKitPersonalities:AppleGraphicsDevicePolicy:ConfigMap:$MYBOARD string none" AppleGraphicsControl.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleGraphicsDevicePolicy.kext/Contents/Info.plist
chown -R 0:0 AppleGraphicsControl.kext
chmod -R 755 AppleGraphicsControl.kext
reboot
 
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leandro077 said:
Update:
So I did as I was told and did the NVRAM reset and the boot chime appeared twice. I just have a black screen, connectors were all ok. So I took the GPU out and it was clearly broken as its CPU wasn't even sitting correctly in its spot anymore. Lifted it off (possible without any force) and saw some melted and deformed pins... (don't know how this can happen though, overheating or defective cooler or something?)

With that out of the way I can order a new GPU and try to get that running!
Click to expand...
So that sounds promising for now - provided you get a boot chime every time when there's no graphics card in your machine. In fact the machine should even boot without the card installed; you could hear the hard drive access in case there's a true HDD installed.
So you can power on your iMac (with no graphics card) until you hear the boot chime and then unplug it. After plugging it in again and switching it on you must get the boot chime - every single time you repeat that process.

Some previous owner of your iMac seems to have tried to revive the graphics card by baking it in an oven (no kidding, that can prolong the life of a broken card by some months) - but he probably left it in the oven for too much time.
 
It's not something you can just do from now on. The first post explains everything in great detail. I have also watched videos of people on youtube who were able to successfully change the grafics card with the bios flash.
If you read into it and find the best graphics card for yourself (How which card works is also described in the first post), it's not that difficult.
 
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iMac 2009 27 inch Graphis Card upgrade K2100M was successful ,brightness control working
perfectly with open Legacy Pacher,tested both on Catalina 10.15.7 & BigSur 11.2,after the 11.2 update iMac Stuck after PRAM reset start again ,Only issue was H.264 still Broken.
iMac 2009.jpeg
 
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