Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Status
The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
Run HW Monitor (and only this tool) to check the temp readings of all sensors. If you see more than the GPU and GPU environment on 129C you found the culprit.

Running ASD may be another option. Download links are hard to find…
Thanks for the hint with ASD, didn't know that yet...

I might be either too stupid or too lazy to search the right place, but which sensor feeds power and power heatsink readings?

1639431687059.png
 
Thanks for the hint with ASD, didn't know that yet...

I might be either too stupid or too lazy to search the right place, but which sensor feeds power and power heatsink readings?
No idea, check this link about ASD a the hardware section on the first post about the Apple Technician Guide. I guess the latter will give you a better idea than just running another test suite. Never had this problem myself.
 
Thanks for the hint with ASD, didn't know that yet...

I might be either too stupid or too lazy to search the right place, but which sensor feeds power and power heatsink readings?
Power Supply sensors

Apple Technician Guide iMac12,2 P26

Apple Technician Guide P26.png


Check (and replace) the fat connector cable to the logic board and to the power supply.
May be I have a spare part...

Have a good night!
 
  • Like
Reactions: m0bil
Dear experts,

I have found a spare ODD temperature sensor cable for my model (iMac 27” 2011).

Is it possible to use that spare cable to attach the sensor to the GPU heatsink, and the connector directly to motherboard instead of GPU sensor cable (of course I will swap the connectors to fit the socket).

Would such installation allow me to keep a native ODD sensor at original place and trick the system into measuring the temp on GPU heatsink as well? Thank you for advise.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Ausdauersportler
Dear experts,

I have found a spare ODD temperature sensor cable for my model (iMac 27” 2011).

Is it possible to use that spare cable to attach the sensor to the GPU heatsink, and the connector directly to motherboard instead of GPU sensor cable (of course I will swap the connectors to fit the socket).

Would such installation allow me to keep a native ODD sensor at original place and trick the system into measuring the temp on GPU heatsink as well? Thank you for advise.
UPDATED

Never tried this and it will not work!

It is not the heat sink sensor which is broken per se, it is the new card not reporting the internal GPU temperature at the same address where the SMC is expecting it.

Use HW Monitor to check the current state: Both the ODD and heat sink temps are reported, the GPU die and GPU environment temps are both missing (129 C). So it is these both internal GPU sensors which confuses the SMC.

Why does it work with relocating the ODD sensor?

The SMC ramps up the fans when the heat sink sensor passes 80 C or when the ODD sensor passes 55 C. Got the 80C value from tests with original ATI cards.

This 80 C limit is way to high! You will fry your new card as you did with the original one. IMHO this is a real design flaw. Apple decided back in 2011 to have a nice customer experience (low spinning fans and a silent work atmosphere) instead of saving the GPU from destroying itself.

You can try to cross over both sensors (heat sink and ODD) leaving the sensors itself at the original place. The heat sink will report it‘s value to the ODD port an the same 55 C limit will be honored.
It is reversible…
 
Last edited:
  • Like
  • Love
Reactions: cyxoe and MrZupp
iMac 27p Mid 2011 Internal Black Screen after GPU upgrade to WX4150

Good afternoon to the entire community.

As you can see, I am new in the forum. I promise, I read and read and read again the first page post (and all the subsequent links).

And I am still banging my head on the walls :-(

I recently purchased a brand new HP WX 4150 which had been flashed by an eminent member of this community and tested on his machine before sending. So I fully rely on this the card is good and should work in my iMac 27 p Mid-2011.

So, when I received the card, I installed it in my iMac and used the OCPL (0.31) formatted USB. A brand new SSD (unformatted) was installed in place of the old HDD but we left another SSD with High Sierra with it. Despite many many hours testing and checking, the internal screen remained black. Whatever ever I do, (Option key) No OC Boot picker at all. Slightly opening the screen, only two led were lightinng up. Never thrid and fourth.
Then, we tried to connect an external screen. We finally got a boot picker on the external screen but only when we are not pushing the option (alt) key.
When choosing the high sierra disk to boot from, we only got a blurry screen of the background wallpaper. We assume this is the secondary display, the login screen must bee on the Black internal lcd (but not visible). After 30 seconds, the fans were blowing full speed.
So, we decided to remove the internal screen and boot on High Sierra. And bang, we got the login screen on the external display and we were able to get in. We installed MacFans in order to lower the speed of the fans, and it worked well. The Graphic card was recognized as a Radeon Polaris with its 4Gb of memory. In Photoshop, the graphic acceleration was on. Unigine Valley was giving us around 52 fps.
Only the first two led were on on the iMac mother board. But at least the card was recognized.

Confident we were on the right track we plugged back the internal screen, we did continue to test multiple configurations (removing all the SSD, just with a USB key (We tested Install USB of High Sierra, Big Sur and Monterey). None of them worked.

At no moment we got the Boot picker on the internal LCD.

At some time, we feared we may have broken something so we dismantle it again and put back the old HD 6770 card in and fired it up. Luckily, everything was still working.

From there, I downloaded the latest OCLP (0.32) and Monterey and reformatted a brand new USB key using the High Sierra. We rebooted and installed Monterey from the USB (still with old graphic card). Everything went smoothly and after two and a half hours Monterey was installed. We booted on it, installed OCLP 0.32 and generated the EFI on the SSD drive, selecting the developer only option for the AMD Polaris GPU.

We then reinstalled the new graphic card (WX4150) with a big hope it will work this time. But no luck so far: What ever we do, we haven't been able so far to get the internal screen lighting up with the new card.

We still do get the boot picker display on the external but only when we do NOT hit the option key. We did several times the PRAM reset (3 times).
We added the agdpmod=pikera in the boot args without any success.

To be honest, at the time i write this message, I feel a bit lost and don't know where to look next.

So, if any member of the community has a bright idea, we are desperate to test anything.

Thanks for you time ;-)

Laurence and Philippe

PS: I am going to be away of the imac for the next two days, not able to test any of the ideas. Be sure I'll test them and report when I'm back.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Pacific1972
PCB Design is same and I see T1J Chip. If I desolder R220, I think in case
I can resolder it with wire bridge. R220 have 0 Ohm, only a layout resistor...

Thank you, I can cut the line there and don't need to deactivate pin #16
(that procedure have the same consequence but looks better on the circuit)

I try the Pros & Cons... ;)
@nikey22 made good research.
Yes, this GPU is working fine without any modding required of SMBus? no conflicts with other devices. So you even could have a native fancontroll.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Pacific1972
Short update about AMD Polaris/Ellesmere GPU on Monterey 12.1:

To enable AirPlay to Mac on your pretty upgraded iMac just enter this line in the terminal app once:

Code:
defaults write com.apple.AppleGVA gvaForceAMDKE -boolean yes

Note: This does not work with NVIDIA or AMD GCN GPU installed.
 
iMac 27p Mid 2011 Internal Black Screen after GPU upgrade to WX4150

Good afternoon to the entire community.

As you can see, I am new in the forum. I promise, I read and read and read again the first page post (and all the subsequent links).

And I am still banging my head on the walls :-(

I recently purchased a brand new HP WX 4150 which had been flashed by an eminent member of this community and tested on his machine before sending. So I fully rely on this the card is good and should work in my iMac 27 p Mid-2011.

So, when I received the card, I installed it in my iMac and used the OCPL (0.31) formatted USB. A brand new SSD (unformatted) was installed in place of the old HDD but we left another SSD with High Sierra with it. Despite many many hours testing and checking, the internal screen remained black. Whatever ever I do, (Option key) No OC Boot picker at all. Slightly opening the screen, only two led were lightinng up. Never thrid and fourth.
Then, we tried to connect an external screen. We finally got a boot picker on the external screen but only when we are not pushing the option (alt) key.
When choosing the high sierra disk to boot from, we only got a blurry screen of the background wallpaper. We assume this is the secondary display, the login screen must bee on the Black internal lcd (but not visible). After 30 seconds, the fans were blowing full speed.
So, we decided to remove the internal screen and boot on High Sierra. And bang, we got the login screen on the external display and we were able to get in. We installed MacFans in order to lower the speed of the fans, and it worked well. The Graphic card was recognized as a Radeon Polaris with its 4Gb of memory. In Photoshop, the graphic acceleration was on. Unigine Valley was giving us around 52 fps.
Only the first two led were on on the iMac mother board. But at least the card was recognized.

Confident we were on the right track we plugged back the internal screen, we did continue to test multiple configurations (removing all the SSD, just with a USB key (We tested Install USB of High Sierra, Big Sur and Monterey). None of them worked.

At no moment we got the Boot picker on the internal LCD.

At some time, we feared we may have broken something so we dismantle it again and put back the old HD 6770 card in and fired it up. Luckily, everything was still working.

From there, I downloaded the latest OCLP (0.32) and Monterey and reformatted a brand new USB key using the High Sierra. We rebooted and installed Monterey from the USB (still with old graphic card). Everything went smoothly and after two and a half hours Monterey was installed. We booted on it, installed OCLP 0.32 and generated the EFI on the SSD drive, selecting the developer only option for the AMD Polaris GPU.

We then reinstalled the new graphic card (WX4150) with a big hope it will work this time. But no luck so far: What ever we do, we haven't been able so far to get the internal screen lighting up with the new card.

We still do get the boot picker display on the external but only when we do NOT hit the option key. We did several times the PRAM reset (3 times).
We added the agdpmod=pikera in the boot args without any success.

To be honest, at the time i write this message, I feel a bit lost and don't know where to look next.

So, if any member of the community has a bright idea, we are desperate to test anything.

Thanks for you time ;-)

Laurence and Philippe

PS: I am going to be away of the imac for the next two days, not able to test any of the ideas. Be sure I'll test them and report when I'm back.
The behaviour you observe is what is to be expected with the standard VBIOSes on such cards.
You don't mention having flashed one of the VBIOSes linked on the first post, so I assume you skipped that step. Flashing the VBIOS is nothing magical, just do as described in the instructions on post 1.
 
iMac 27p Mid 2011 Internal Black Screen after GPU upgrade to WX4150

Good afternoon to the entire community.

As you can see, I am new in the forum. I promise, I read and read and read again the first page post (and all the subsequent links).

And I am still banging my head on the walls :-(

I recently purchased a brand new HP WX 4150 which had been flashed by an eminent member of this community and tested on his machine before sending. So I fully rely on this the card is good and should work in my iMac 27 p Mid-2011.

So, when I received the card, I installed it in my iMac and used the OCPL (0.31) formatted USB. A brand new SSD (unformatted) was installed in place of the old HDD but we left another SSD with High Sierra with it. Despite many many hours testing and checking, the internal screen remained black. Whatever ever I do, (Option key) No OC Boot picker at all. Slightly opening the screen, only two led were lightinng up. Never thrid and fourth.
Then, we tried to connect an external screen. We finally got a boot picker on the external screen but only when we are not pushing the option (alt) key.
When choosing the high sierra disk to boot from, we only got a blurry screen of the background wallpaper. We assume this is the secondary display, the login screen must bee on the Black internal lcd (but not visible). After 30 seconds, the fans were blowing full speed.
So, we decided to remove the internal screen and boot on High Sierra. And bang, we got the login screen on the external display and we were able to get in. We installed MacFans in order to lower the speed of the fans, and it worked well. The Graphic card was recognized as a Radeon Polaris with its 4Gb of memory. In Photoshop, the graphic acceleration was on. Unigine Valley was giving us around 52 fps.
Only the first two led were on on the iMac mother board. But at least the card was recognized.

Confident we were on the right track we plugged back the internal screen, we did continue to test multiple configurations (removing all the SSD, just with a USB key (We tested Install USB of High Sierra, Big Sur and Monterey). None of them worked.

At no moment we got the Boot picker on the internal LCD.

At some time, we feared we may have broken something so we dismantle it again and put back the old HD 6770 card in and fired it up. Luckily, everything was still working.

From there, I downloaded the latest OCLP (0.32) and Monterey and reformatted a brand new USB key using the High Sierra. We rebooted and installed Monterey from the USB (still with old graphic card). Everything went smoothly and after two and a half hours Monterey was installed. We booted on it, installed OCLP 0.32 and generated the EFI on the SSD drive, selecting the developer only option for the AMD Polaris GPU.

We then reinstalled the new graphic card (WX4150) with a big hope it will work this time. But no luck so far: What ever we do, we haven't been able so far to get the internal screen lighting up with the new card.

We still do get the boot picker display on the external but only when we do NOT hit the option key. We did several times the PRAM reset (3 times).
We added the agdpmod=pikera in the boot args without any success.

To be honest, at the time i write this message, I feel a bit lost and don't know where to look next.

So, if any member of the community has a bright idea, we are desperate to test anything.

Thanks for you time ;-)

Laurence and Philippe

PS: I am going to be away of the imac for the next two days, not able to test any of the ideas. Be sure I'll test them and report when I'm back.

Long story short:

The card is working with High Sierra and an external display. This works as designed, unfortunately one has to patch High Sierra or use the boot-arg agdpmod=vit9696. This has been mentioned on the first post within the known issues tab of the AMD Polaris cards family:

  1. Initial setup: Using High Sierra the GOP vBIOS disables the internal LCD on power on.
    Work around: Use an additional external display on boot.
    High Sierra: Add this patch to enable the internal LCD even without using the external display. You need to disable SIP in recovery before being able to do this.

Since your plan is to move on to Monterey please just use the High Sierra patcher. The boot-args setting will conflict with all more recent macOS needs.

After getting HS working on the internal screen move on and reinstall OCLP using the hardware.
Reboot and check HS again and now boot the Monterey installer.
You may create a new APFS and install it in parallel just to test it.

What I do not understand is why your initial plan did not work. Monterey should have enabled your screen.
Q: You did not by any chance patch the Monterey installation?
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Philby2530
Just updated my mid 2011 iMac 12.2 from High Sierra to Bug Sur 11.4 with OpenCore using the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) method.

I tried several attempts to upgrade to Catalina using Dosdude’s patcher method but it always got stuck during reboot.

I also updated the GTX780M 4GB GPU to the BIOS provided by nikey22

My first time using OpenCore. All went quite smoothly nothing difficult at all.


View attachment 1804230

All seems to be working except that the iMac will now not recognize a USB connected UPS, there’s no button / sub menu in System Preferences > Energy Saver. I have tried 3 different UPS and different USB cables none work. UPS connected by USB worked fine with hIgh Sierra. Any ideas on solving this appreciated.


Many thanks to all those who contribute to this forum, making our old macs live on with the latest Mac OS.
Hello, what is the temperature of your card?
 
Long story short:

The card is working with High Sierra and an external display. This works as designed, unfortunately one has to patch High Sierra or use the boot-arg agdpmod=vit9696. This has been mentioned on the first post within the known issues tab of the AMD Polaris cards family:

  1. Initial setup: Using High Sierra the GOP vBIOS disables the internal LCD on power on.
    Work around: Use an additional external display on boot.
    High Sierra: Add this patch to enable the internal LCD even without using the external display. You need to disable SIP in recovery before being able to do this.

Since your plan is to move on to Monterey please just use the High Sierra patcher. The boot-args setting will conflict with all more recent macOS needs.

After getting HS working on the internal screen move on and reinstall OCLP using the hardware.
Reboot and check HS again and now boot the Monterey installer.
You may create a new APFS and install it in parallel just to test it.

What I do not understand is why your initial plan did not work. Monterey should have enabled your screen.

Thanks a lot for your answer Ausdauersporler.

I will try to apply your advice and install the HS patcher.

When we try to boot on High Sierra now, with an external display, we only got an image than looks like the one on the secondary screen in a dual display displays configuration (blurry diosplay background without user login). With the new card, we were only able to boot the High Sierra system by removing the internal lcd.
For the time being I am trying to boot in recovery mode on the external screen to disable SIP without success so far. But I'll continue to search.

To answer your last question, could it be possible that the internal lcd was disabled because right after having installed the new card, the imac started by himself just pluging in the AC power cable without pushing the on/off button? And we are having troubles for more than two days because of this?

To answser your very last question, no I did not patch the Monterey installation.

Thanks again.

update 22h00 : whatever I tried, I am not able to get the recovery mode displayed on the external screen. When I am back on Thursday evening, I'll try to reconnect the old Original HDD with High Sierra (Now I can boot on the High Sierra SSD but may be there is no recovery partition on it?? I don't know.)
update 2: I checked and the recovery partition of the SSD in empty (only a file: wheel).
 
Last edited:
@nikey22 made good research.
Yes, this GPU is working fine without any modding required of SMBus? no conflicts with other devices. So you even could have a native fancontroll.

I've now read about SMBus compare to I2CBus on Wikipedia :rolleyes:

Cutting the SMBus line on the video card was surely not the best idea, but
the W6170 is from 2016. I'm not sure about older SMBus Protocol and
functionality of iMac 2009-2011 and perhaps old SMBus protocol OR
extended newer I2CBus protocol of the W6170 Video card ?

If that is the case then incompatibility between iMac 2009-2011 and W6170
(from 2016) is no wonder - sparely compatible but perhaps different protocols...
 
I've now read about SMBus compare to I2CBus on Wikipedia :rolleyes:

Cutting the SMBus line on the video card was surely not the best idea, but
the W6170 is from 2016. I'm not sure about older SMBus Protocol and
functionality of iMac 2009-2011 and perhaps old SMBus protocol OR
extended newer I2CBus protocol of the W6170 Video card ?

If that is the case then incompatibility between iMac 2009-2011 and W6170
(from 2016) is no wonder - sparely compatible but perhaps different protocols...
Are you sure the MXM standard included the I2Cbus implementation?

From the MXM specification v31_10 I found this:

"The MXM version 3.1 module shall connect a thermal sensor, compatible to the MAX6649 or LM99, to the SMBus for reading the GPU die temperature. The system must be able to access the GPU die temperature at any of the four possible SMBus addresses 0x98, 0x9E, 0x56, or 0x32. The module must respond to at least one of the addresses but may at the designer option respond to multiple or all of them. The MXM module may include MXM MIS at any of the module SMBus address. The SMBus address shown here is the 8-bit address, where the seven most signicant bits are the address and the least signicant bit is the read/write bit."

And so on. It is all about the SMBUS....
 
  • Like
Reactions: Painkiller
I am using this WX4150 card below in my 2010 and 2011 27” iMacs and is working flawless in Big Sur and Monterey. A little pricey maybe but since you need two maybe you can try negotiating with the seller on a pair of them:

2010 iMac 11,3 i7 870, 16 GB, WX4150 w/WX4150_GOP.rom vBios, OCLP 0.3.1 Monterey 12.0.1
2011 iMac 12,2 i7 2600, 32 GB, WX4150 w/WX4150_GOP.rom vBios, OCLP 0.3.1 Monterey 12.0.1

Regard your wx4150: did you modified this cards somehow? Or did they POST anyways? I got the same V343-1.1 and a iMac12,2 for very view money with defect Nvidia gpu . Ideal for the metal gpu project. But the Mac won’t POST with this card. The layout of this card differs compared to the HP version. So I can’t mod it easily. The card itself works in a iMac9,1 where in I flash the bios . Tried different vbioses but no luck.
The iMac itself is working well.
 
Last edited:
I've now read about SMBus compare to I2CBus on Wikipedia :rolleyes:

Cutting the SMBus line on the video card was surely not the best idea, but
the W6170 is from 2016. I'm not sure about older SMBus Protocol and
functionality of iMac 2009-2011 and perhaps old SMBus protocol OR
extended newer I2CBus protocol of the W6170 Video card ?

If that is the case then incompatibility between iMac 2009-2011 and W6170
(from 2016) is no wonder - sparely compatible but perhaps different protocols...
Smbus is simple data signals. It contain Address of device, command and data. It has two states for write or read.

Thats is example of talking with thermal IC (EMC1412-1) by pch on address 4C:
ddaattta.png




here is look like when device is not responding or does not exist
4D.png
 
Regard your wx4150: did you modified this cards somehow? Or did they POST anyways? I got the same V343-1.1 and a iMac12,2 for very view money with defect Nvidia gpu . Ideal for the metal gpu project. But the Mac won’t POST with this card. The layout of this card differs compared to the HP version. So I can’t mod it easily. The card itself works in a iMac9,1 where in I flash the bios . Tried different vbioses but no luck.
The iMac itself is working well.
Can you provide high-resolution photos of your non-POSTing WX4150? (Confusingly, there are differences among some Dell WX41x0 cards of the same version...)
 
Can you provide high-resolution photos of your non-POSTing WX4150? (Confusingly, there are differences among some Dell WX41x0 cards of the same version...)
Ok itsnt as good as necessary, I’ll try tonight again when I am home. The fans are running and the first led is constantly on , no flashing. Smbus?
 

Attachments

  • 4C8F02DC-650B-40ED-985E-939A878F2D64.jpeg
    4C8F02DC-650B-40ED-985E-939A878F2D64.jpeg
    464.2 KB · Views: 110
  • 92DF3F34-C187-4FF9-9CC3-9C35E74E3D92.jpeg
    92DF3F34-C187-4FF9-9CC3-9C35E74E3D92.jpeg
    409.2 KB · Views: 118
  • 994F2D3E-4849-4F1E-80A8-3F34BE28D148.jpeg
    994F2D3E-4849-4F1E-80A8-3F34BE28D148.jpeg
    619.8 KB · Views: 135
The behaviour you observe is what is to be expected with the standard VBIOSes on such cards.
You don't mention having flashed one of the VBIOSes linked on the first post, so I assume you skipped that step. Flashing the VBIOS is nothing magical, just do as described in the instructions on post 1.
Thanks intermetzel.
The vbios was flashed by the former owner of the card.
 
Ok itsnt as good as necessary, I’ll try tonight again when I am home. The fans are running and the first led is constantly on , no flashing. Smbus?
Those photos are (really) bad. But there is no temp. sensor IC, so there should be no SMBus issues. Also, if the fans are running, that's not how those cards (usually) fail to POST. (Usually, fans will spin for a split second, then stop.)
Do you hear a chime? Does LED2 light up?
 
Those photos are (really) bad. But there is no temp. sensor IC, so there should be no SMBus issues. Also, if the fans are running, that's not how those cards (usually) fail to POST. (Usually, fans will spin for a split second, then stop.)
Do you hear a chime? Does LED2 light up?
Sorry again for the really bad pics . No chime , no second light. The fans turn to full speed after a short while…
 
Sorry again for the really bad pics . No chime , no second light. The fans turn to full speed after a short while…

You can try to remove card, and with card removed do three PRAM resets in a row (keep cmd + alt + P + R pressed till you hear the chime 3 times).

Also, to discard any heatsink installation problem, you can try booting with the card installed without heatsink and see if you get second light and chime (after the 3 pram resets), but don't keep the iMac powered on more that 30 secs without gpu heatsink, this is just short test intended to discard heatsink problems.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.