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

[natus.w]

Hi guys)

I have second iMac 27 2009, with the original video card, it is connected by a cable on pass to port, when pressing a cmd f2 the black screen, Prompt how to connect the target display or how to make friends with my other iMac with the video card GTX880 the system Catalina is installed?

Still I noticed that the iMac GTX880 display is a little more dim on

Target Display only works between 2 devices with with HS and older, you'll have to use the mini-DisplayPort ports to get video out on another screen (you'll have to buy a cable like this: https://www.showmecables.com/mini-displayport-male-to-mini-displayport-male)

Display brightness is a known issue, you'll have to follow the instructions from this post here if you want this functionality restored.

 

[The_Croupier]

One question, though: Is OCLP (or some other bootloader) truly necessary once the vBIOS has been flashed? If it is flashed it seems to my ignorant musician brain that this would make it a "Mac GPU" that is ready to go.

With K4100 it’s only necessary if you want to install an unsupported OS like Mojave or later.

 

[oziefrog]

Hi guys,

Just wanted to inform you about the installation of my GTX 880M 8GB in my 2011 27" iMac and the little issues I've got.
The hardware install went fine, I've got the boot screens and the native brightness is ok, but I still have an issue.

In fact it's really hard to start my iMac, when I push the button once I have only one led on on the motherboard and there's a 1 second impulse on both fans and that's all, everything turns back off. I need to push the button 5 or 6 times for my iMac to start.
Also, sometimes the iMac starts but the bluetooth, the wifi cards and the USB ports are not recognized.

Did someone have the same issues?

Thanks in advance

Jerome, France

 

[DerTschnig]

Hi Guys,

My iMac mid 2011 with the 3100 works fine........

My New Projekt is an iMac 2011 with an 610K GPU.
I flash the GPU with the K610M_EG2.rom.
The iMac works with open core.
The Installation of BigSur was perfekt, but the restart ending in a Boot loop. (Please see Video).
.....and the CPU Fan works with full speed.

Please Help

Thank you Guys

 

[The_Croupier]

Hi guys,

Just wanted to inform you about the installation of my GTX 880M 8GB in my 2011 27" iMac and the little issues I've got.
The hardware install went fine, I've got the boot screens and the native brightness is ok, but I still have an issue.

In fact it's really hard to start my iMac, when I push the button once I have only one led on on the motherboard and there's a 1 second impulse on both fans and that's all, everything turns back off. I need to push the button 5 or 6 times for my iMac to start.
Also, sometimes the iMac starts but the bluetooth, the wifi cards and the USB ports are not recognized.

Did someone have the same issues?

Thanks in advance

Jerome, France

My latest 880m install broke wake from sleep and power button requires 2 presses to boot other than that it is working great.
No issues with WiFi card or USB.
All I can suggest is to check all your cabling.

 

[The_Croupier]

Hi Guys,

My iMac mid 2011 with the 3100 works fine........

My New Projekt is an iMac 2011 with an 610K GPU.
I flash the GPU with the K610M_EG2.rom.
The iMac works with open core.
The Installation of BigSur was perfekt, but the restart ending in a Boot loop. (Please see Video).
.....and the CPU Fan works with full speed.

Please Help

Thank you Guys

View attachment 1835997

Vertical lines graphical glitch, looks like your K610 is a dud.

 

[dfranetic]

Hi Guys,

My iMac mid 2011 with the 3100 works fine........

My New Projekt is an iMac 2011 with an 610K GPU.
I flash the GPU with the K610M_EG2.rom.
The iMac works with open core.
The Installation of BigSur was perfekt, but the restart ending in a Boot loop. (Please see Video).
.....and the CPU Fan works with full speed.

It‘s either a failing card (as @The_Croupier wrote) or the card has an unsupported RAM type. Can you test the behavior with original VBIOS (possibly on an external display)? If it still shows those ‘vertical artifacts’, it’s likely a dead card.

 

[oziefrog]

My latest 880m install broke wake from sleep and power button requires 2 presses to boot other than that it is working great.
No issues with WiFi card or USB.
All I can suggest is to check all your cabling.

Ok thanks for your reply, I'm gonna re-open my iMac and check the wiring and the power button. ;-)

 

[Lady Titan]

Target Display only works between 2 devices with with HS and older, you'll have to use the mini-DisplayPort ports to get video out on another screen (you'll have to buy a cable like this: https://www.showmecables.com/mini-displayport-male-to-mini-displayport-male)

Display brightness is a known issue, you'll have to follow the instructions from this post here if you want this functionality restored.

Thanks for the answer, Can I not correctly was expressed, I have the same cable) a question why the black screen?

 

[internetzel]

Ok thanks for your reply, I'm gonna re-open my iMac and check the wiring and the power button. ;-)

And you should also recheck the heat sink installation.
I've learnt that a non-isolating (metal based) thermal paste did work with one card but not with another one - so one should stay away from those.
And there must be enough clearance between all components of the graphics card and the heat sink.

 

[SRR117]

The GPU die temperature sensor problem!
​

You all know that none of the modified BIOS versions for the Metal GPUs listed in the table on page #1 is able to provide the internal GPU temperature back correctly to be used by the iMacs internal Apple SMC software to control the (ODD) fan according to the GPU internal temperature.

To address this issue we recommended strongly to use a free software called Macs Fan Control.

A different solution has been described several times now and last week and was in the mood to reopen my iMacs again and did this simple mod.

I (carefully) separated the ODD temp sensor using my finger nails and placed it on the back side off the GPU sink (side by side with the sink temperature sensor). Then I used a simple and cheap two component epoxy alike glue and fixed the little sensor. During the first experimental phase I used just a 3M or Tesa strip to hold the sensor in place.

Spoiler: There may be a more simplistic approach:

Just cut off the two cables in the near the sensor and exchange the cable ends with the plugs connecting the same colors simply together (grey to grey and black to black). So you can easily connect the original heat sink sensor to the ODD connector in the logic board and vice versa.

Doing this you have a working fan control again even when doing system upgrades or during the start phase. As you may have noticed the Macs Fan Control used before is a user land application and it is only working after primary login to your account.

I attached some pictures showing the Macs Fan Control in automatic (i.e. SMC) mode under full Valley load (WX4170) and the hardware mod.

Notes:
Please use Macs Fan Control (or a similar software) in any case as a fall back if the replaced internal sensor fails of the glue does not hold it properly. It is a nice tool to monitor what is going on internally. HW Monitor using the FakeSMC extensions gives you graphs and

The SCM comes in at nearly 55 C of the ODD sensor. This is late compared to my former settings starting at 40 C. There are some websites writing about normal GPU temps, so everything below 70 is perfect, everything below 80 tolerable. But keep in your mind that endless gaming is burning Rom your CPU ....

Having a powerful GPU (780M, K4100M, WX4170 etc) will burn 70-75W and cause this amount of heat.

Hi everyone

I haven’t been understanding if Macs Fan Control solves the GPU sensor issue or if it’s mandatory to replace the sensor itself with a new one.

Thank you so much for your awesome job

 

[axrst]

One question, though: Is OCLP (or some other bootloader) truly necessary once the vBIOS has been flashed? If it is flashed it seems to my ignorant musician brain that this would make it a "Mac GPU" that is ready to go. I understand that this is not the case, but keeping a USB stick hanging out of the back of my machine is not good as I have three cats. Three very curious cats. Need I say more about that? (heh, heh, heh…) Curtis Gross posted how to configure OC to autoload, and someone in the comments stated that a small (like 200MB) partition could be installed to the boot drive and the contents of the thumb drive copied over to that, and then listing it as the boot drive from that point on.

You need OCLP if you want to install a unsupported OS like Big Sur. BUT: it is not needed to install it to a thumb usb drive. After a successful installation, you can safely installed it in the EFI of your main drive and get rid of the usb. So, no cat danger anymore!

Have a look in this guide to get a better idea:

 

[JohnPascololo]

Sorry to hear that, depending on how you ripped pads, there are contact pads on the back of the card for eeprom pins (it's a pull/up down network), maybe you could route thin wire from missing pads to back of the card pads:
View attachment 1829487

But I would first test that RP1 is well soldered, there are pads easily found to to the left of RP1 and on the pull/up down network to check that (there must be 33 ohm between legs and no shortcuts). Not an easy job, however...

edit: more detailed network pic:

View attachment 1829581

Can you tell me which one is #HOLD?

 

[m0bil]

Can you tell me which one is #HOLD?

HOLD# (pin 7) is shorted to Vcc (pin 8), so just connecting this two adjacent pins will be ok

 

[JohnPascololo]

Write Protect also to VCC?

 

[m0bil]

Write Protect also to VCC?

Yes, pin 3 (WP#) also direct connected to Vcc

 

[m0bil]

Write Protect also to VCC?

Btw, which eeprom chip are you using?

 

[Lady Titan]

help to solve the problem, what could be the reason, there is no image through the target display

 

[eablokker]

help to solve the problem, what could be the reason, there is no image through the target display

I think you will need a Mini DisplayPort to Mini DisplayPort cable, not a Thunderbolt cable. The 2009 iMac doesn't support Thunderbolt.

 

[eablokker]

Posting this from my OCLP Big Sur installation. Been using for 2 days and no kernel panics!! I guess that means OCLP is a lot more stable and compatible than the old Dosdude1 patcher because my patched Mojave would randomly kernel panic.

I did run into an issue after several hours where every app I tried to launch would "quit unexpectedly" but this was temporary until a reboot. Maybe because I forgot to install Macs Fan Control. Has anyone else had problems with all apps quitting unexpectedly on launch?

Airplay is gone, but curiously Airplay still works from inside the Music app. There are lots of third party Airplay apps to replace that functionality, like Airfoil for audio and AirBeam, LetsView and others for video.

 

[iPhone_se]

RX460 and WX4150 MXM cards should be (almost?) the same thing.
You should check the memory type and report it here.
Chances are good that the latest WX4150 VBIOSes will work.

I picked up a nice 2011 iMac 27” over the weekend from Craigslist for $100. A little dirty inside but screen is flawless. I have a Xeon 1290, 32 GB DDR3, and this WX4150 on the way. It’s a 216-0896288 so hoping it works as good as my blue HP 216-0896288 WX4150 in my 2010 11,3 iMac after flashing with the latest VBIOS. Price is a little higher than the $62 I paid for the HP earlier this year, but seems fair as long as the GPU works. Will keep everyone posted on the results when it gets here this week:

Dell WX4150 on the bay

 

[JohnPascololo]

For anyone using a GTX 880M I wanted to share my findings testing the stock DELL VBIOS vs. the Nickey Bios.

	Stock DELL Bios	Nickey
Needs 30 seconds to bring up screen in Bootcamp before Login	No	Yes
Color Banding in MacOS	No	Yes
Display Port Audio support	Yes	No
Requires WhatEverGreen	Yes	No
Rendering Issues in MacOS*	Yes	No (when running witouth whatevergreen) Yes (when running with whatevergreen)
Native Bootscreen Support	No	Yes

Regarding the rendering issues in MacOS I need to test a bit more, but I have not experienced them when running without whatevergreen, so I'm guessing these issues could be related to that open core plugin.

All in all, since opencore brings it's own boot selector I find the native stock GTX ROM is the better choice, but everyone may decide for himself.

One question which came up to my mind was if it would be an alternative solution to whatevergreen to make the card work natively in macOS. Would it be possible to fake some device name via SSDT or editing some macOS kext and tweaking some device IDs?

Best of regards
J.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

Got this file from another user months ago. It is an SSDT patch to inject an WX4150 BIOS using OpenCore. To use it one would have to adjust the device path, need a lot of OpenCore knowledge and a lot of time. @m0bil tried this without success using his BIOS-less WX4170. So it will not be easy, if possible at all.

You can try to use a different vBIOS - it is different from the ones @internetzel published here. IMHO the main challenge will be to get injection working at all. So we are looking for the real Hackintosh expert to start this. All AMD cards I got (with an BIOS chip) were working from the start with the vBIOS pre existing on the card even on a Mac (no boot screen, of course).

The main purpose of the post is re-distribution to the public!

Have fun!

 

[hugodlc]

The catch with that SSDT is that it will inject the rom into ioreg, but that may not be where the driver is reading it from.
This is especially true starting from Catalina, the rom is read directly from the mxm card's chip or shadow ram.
So if this method works at all, Mojave will be the last OS where it will work.

 

[nikey22]

Re: "Needs 30 seconds to bring up screen in Bootcamp before Login"

This is a little unusual. I wonder if it has anything to do with the countdown timer that exists in the vga firmware bootloader of Nvidia cards. This area of code is designed to warn the user that the MXM card is out of spec with the systemBIOS recommendations (for heat/voltage etc).

Let's disassamble the code of interest:

072A:4F19 7447          JZ      A6A5
072A:4F1B B01E          MOV     AL,1E            ;counter=30  <------ "1E= 30 seconds"
072A:4F1D 8D2E3DA6      LEA     BP,[A63D]        ;load string addr
072A:4F21 8CC9          MOV     CX,CS            ;the string
072A:4F23 8EC1          MOV     ES,CX
072A:4F25 EB37          JMP     A6A1            ;Jump into loop
072A:4F27 FEC8          DEC     AL                ;decrement counter by 1
072A:4F29 50            PUSH    AX                ;display the counter info
072A:4F2A 9C            PUSHF           
072A:4F2B D40A          AAM     0A

You can see we are moving a "1E" here in the CPU register, AL.

Let's change that to "01".

072A:4F1B B01E          MOV     AL,01    ; 1 second delay

Based on my records, @JohnPascololo I believe you have a Samsung vram GTX880M, similar to @The_Croupier. I did my testing on hynix based card and I don't recall that there was a delay, but I'll have install it and check that again.
Regardless, let's give this ROM a shot. You will have to reinstall drivers in Windows I believe.