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iM 4,1-14,4 iMac 2011 Maxwell and Pascal GPU upgrade
- Thread starter G3llings
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my 1070 just showed up in the mail along with my ch341 programmer and 1.8v adapter. Im messing around with as programmer with my stock amd 6750 card before i go messing with flashing my new expensive 1070. Following the guides posted way back in this thread i am able to hook up the programmer and adapter properly and connect to the eeprom chip on my amd card. it will read the ic perfectly fine and display all the info about it. however attempting to erase or flash a new bios to it. downloaded from tech powerup for testing purposes it says protection may be enabled press unprotect and check data sheet. upon cancelling the running process and hitting unprotect it shows the old sreg followed by a lot of 1s and grays out every other option and doesnt do anything else. i am using the ic of w25q40ew 1.8v. is it an issue with my selected ic or something with this card? Just looking for some clarification before i dive into my 1070 and possibly brick it.
Which software are you using, AsProgrammer? If so, selecting W25Q40EW_1.8V is needed for some eeprom chips used on Pascal cards, like the IS25WQ040.
But for the amd card, check the eeprom chip reference, most probably it's a 3.3v and you'll need to select another chip in AsProgrammer (and not use the 1.8v adapter), just be sure to check the eeprom chip reference.
Yes I'm using AsProgrammer. Where do I check the chip reference? I tried to look at what was written on the chip but there's a purple marking dot drawn on it from the factory I assume that covers up half of the things written on it. Sorry if these are dumb but I've never manually flashed a card before.
I'm attaching a pic of the eeprom chip on the old amd card just so I can be educated on what I need to be looking for as far as the eeprom chip reference.
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Will try tonight and report back. Which one should I be using for my 1070 after I get this working
Alright that worked great! Set up at 3.3v and didn't use the adapter and selected the pm25ld010 ic and was able to unprotect, erase, flash and verify successfully on the old stock card. Will be trying with the 1070 in the next couple days when I have time to and will use the 1.8v adapter and attempt to read the eeprom chip with a different ic. I see the pm25ld010 written on the amd chip very tiny so will check my 1070 to find the correct ic.
I’ve currently got two iMac 2011s, one with k5100 and one with wx7100.
I plan to keep the wx7100 to run Ventura.
My kids like to play games though and ofcourse both the cards struggle a bit (although better than I expected.)
So which card should I target for absolute max gaming performance? I do already have a gaming pc (rtx3090), but I just like the challenge of upgrading these iMacs 😁. Not really too worried about the cost.
Reading all the threads, rtx 1070 is quite good. They’re fairly old now though. Is rtx 4000 or 5000 faster in theory. Do they work yet - don’t see any bios for them ….
Or is amd rx5700xt or similar a good option?
Any help appreciated…
I plan to keep the wx7100 to run Ventura.
My kids like to play games though and ofcourse both the cards struggle a bit (although better than I expected.)
So which card should I target for absolute max gaming performance? I do already have a gaming pc (rtx3090), but I just like the challenge of upgrading these iMacs 😁. Not really too worried about the cost.
Reading all the threads, rtx 1070 is quite good. They’re fairly old now though. Is rtx 4000 or 5000 faster in theory. Do they work yet - don’t see any bios for them ….
Or is amd rx5700xt or similar a good option?
Any help appreciated…
@m0bil Success today! flashed the 1070 with little issue and it works great in my machine! I have one question for you though as far as brightness control goes in windows 10. On my old card 880m i did the regedit entries to gain native brightness control without having open core installed on my imac. I entered the same entires in the correct directory now with the 1070 and i still dont have a brightness slider in the settings or notification shade like i did before. Does this card bios require open core for that to work in windows or am i missing something dumb?
Great it works!
No, Windows 10 brightness control do not require Opencore (in fact I'm running my gtx1070 on windows10 without opencore at all, as you can mod the iMac bootrom to enable native GOP bootscreen and fix the windows 10 audio bug).
So, make sure you put the regedit entries right, if that seems to fail maybe try upgrading the Nvidia drivers, but it's all the same solution for all Nvidia cards and windows 10 brightness control.
Ok sounds good. Don't really care about boot screen and the audio doesn't bother me as I use headphones or Bluetooth for audio on the computer. I'll double check over the reg edit stuff tomorrow just to make sure and I'm running the latest Nvidia drivers from the ge force experience. Have tried both game ready and studio drivers so far so it must be something I did funky with the reg edit stuff. Also something else I just discovered as I've been messing with things is that it no longer supports Miracast for wireless displays with this card. It worked with the 880m but this one shows wifi yes but graphics driver no. I did some online searching and apparently it's a problem between Nvidia and windows with more recent cards but just wanted to touch with you and see if that was something you've tested or encountered this far.
Of the current tested cards, I'd go with the gtx1070.
Turing cards like RTX 4000 or RTX 5000 are expected to work faster, but have not been tested yet on iMac. Take a look at this post from @Santa's Little Helper where he successfully tested a RTX 1000, so my guess is that RTX cards designed for the HP Zbook G6 will work. They will need an additional hardware mod to enable backlight (the reason is that Turing vbios can't be modded as it is digitally signed).
Also I'd upgrade the CPU to a 2700K.
Got it reflashed with the non 125w ROM since I hit some isntabilities due to throttling will do some more testing and see if I can figure out the brightness issues
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@m0bil finally got it all running stable and smooth on my set up. The non 125w ROM runs so much better with a non noticable performance hit in games. Wanted to take the time to thank you and all the other devs on here for your helpful comments to creating the roms for these GPUs in the first place. Still didn't figure out the brightness issue but I'm sure I'll get it eventually. Overall very happy with this set up and it's performance even in modern games as 1440p. Just in case anybody cares my set up is a 2011 27 inch iMac with a 1 terabyte SSD and removed optical drive. Xeon 1290 CPU and my brand new GTX 1070. 32 gb of ram and it's an absolute monster!
Nice! Yeah, raising TDP to 125W sometimes makes voltage throttle issues appear, I also noticed that for overall use the 115W version seems more stable (you can tweak the 125W with Afterbuner to reduce TDP and/or undervolt, but it's usually a lot of work for not so many gain).
If you got drivers messed up, you can use DDU to completely remove them, then let windows download and install official nvidia ones and start over. Later if you want you can use NVCleanstall to update to latest ones.
Also keep an eye on GPU temp, should not get above ~75ºC. One additional trick if you need extra GPU cooling is leaving the ODD sensor cable disconnected, that way MFC can ramp up the ODD fan up to 3800 rpm.
I use mac's fan control to keep all the temps in check for sure. Gaming it sits high 60s to very low 70s so it seems fairly happy there. With ddu don't you need to get to windows safe mode though? Without the bootscreen will the windows recovery environment even display anything?
You can avoid the windows safe mode in DDU (is just recommended), but without bootscreen you'll get no screen until windows loads a Nvidia driver, so no screen on windows recovery too.
You should get bootscreen either using Opencore or (much better) by patching the iMac bootrom, it's really a simple procedure now that you know how to clip and program an eeprom chip and it will save you from trouble in the future.
Do you have any info or a write up somewhere on the boot ROM patch? That sounds like a much better and safer long term alternative.
Could I ask where you got new gtx 1070 from please? I think I’m going to go down that route too.
Please help. iMac 12,5 mid 2011 ssd intel i7-2600s RAM 32Gb I stitched gtx 1070 Pascal with 115W tailoring from m0bil. Now, if boot-args -v is enabled, it stops on the screen, but if you log in via ssh, then everything shows. Screen resolution is not adjustable. What did I do wrong? OpenCore 0.8.8
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You really put a GTX1070 on a 21.5 inch iMac ???? 🙄🙄
Now the card is working at low power state but, as soon as it starts consuming 115W, you'll have problems with the PSU (rated 205W) and, most important, the gpu heatsink will not be able to dissipate the heat, most probably you'll end up with a broken iMac and/or card.
With that said, your problem now is that the internal screen is not recognized, you'll need a correctly configured Opencore/OCLP to have emulated bootscreen. Even without bootscreen you'll need correct version of Nvidia Web Drivers installed for High Sierra to recognize the card. Search posts in this thread for more info on that.
Can anyone help?
1.I flashed this M5000M with the one in this thread.
2. Installed Ventura but booting up was stuck with around 40% progress bar forever once installation is done.
3. What I found was booting in Safe mode was possible, I could login the OS. But normal boot not possible.
4. So tried to install freshly by erasing existing partition.
5. After installing Ventura again, I got no boot up screen nor recovery mode.
Basicallly, I can hear chime but nothing is shown in the display.
What other option I can try?