There are no drivers for either of these GPUs, so unless you have a flashed GPU that gives you a basic unaccelerated framebuffer on Snow Leopard, they're no good.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Most collectible early Intel Mac
- Thread starter VivienM
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The 2012 non-Retina MBP just uses a fairly easy to swap battery - it's not glued in, it's screwed in.
So I've been noticing lots of 6970 iMacs for sale on Facebook Marketplace - is there a point where one can think that if they haven't failed in a decade, they're... not going to?
All 6xxx chips fail at some point, no matter if it's been running for a year or 10+ years. It may that some only lightly used the computer when it was new and then put it into storage for a long period of time, but once you get it up and doing heavy tasks, it will fail.
Unlike NVIDIA and the 602/3 8600M GT saga, AMD never made a replacement chip that fixed dying chips. Apple had to replace dead chips with chips that would fail again and again.
Each time I’m reminded AMD failed due diligence to own their mistake — by a) designing a chip which wouldn’t have that flaw, and b) simply fixing it with a revision — I’m reminded of how many of the 2011 Macs were deprived of a particularly uncommon distinction of enjoying an apex of features, [backward and forward] compatibility, versatility, functionality, and reliability. Few Mac models/years from any era enjoy such a distinction, but when they do, they tend to be the most unforgettable, most loved, and most sought-after.
Last edited:
The 2011 17" really highlights your point.
- Quad-core Sandy Bridge
- 16GB support
- Snow Leopard through to Monterey
- Matte display
And then AMD goes and ruins it with a dying GPU chip that they don't bother revising.
Don’t forget it has ExpressCard and Thunderbolt and is the only MBP to feature both.
As infuriating as it is, you can use the machine on the HD 3000 only and attach an eGPU via ExpressCard or Thunderbolt when you want to drive an external display.
But then you can't use the matching Thunderbolt Display
Though you'd need an external GPU to use an external monitor anyway since as you said the internal display output (through the Thunderbolt/mDP connector) was handled solely by the AMD chip. Is other functions of the TB port unaffected when the Radeon is physically disabled, as then you could run a TB docking station off the TB port to get USB 3 and use the ExpressCard slot for an external GPU.
Out of curiosity, if patched to run Monterey would a modern GPU like the 6600 XT work through an ExpressCard adapter cable?
If you're collecting an early Intel, in my opinion you should value the ability to boot Mac OS 10.4.
If you do that, and avoid the ghastly GMA950/X3100 and faulty 8600GT, you're left with either 2006-2007 Mac Pros, or the super interesting mid 2007 iMacs, that can officially boot anything between 10.4.10 all the way to 10.11.6.
And if you go for the 24", you even have a sweet IPS display.
That'd be my choice.
If you do that, and avoid the ghastly GMA950/X3100 and faulty 8600GT, you're left with either 2006-2007 Mac Pros, or the super interesting mid 2007 iMacs, that can officially boot anything between 10.4.10 all the way to 10.11.6.
And if you go for the 24", you even have a sweet IPS display.
That'd be my choice.
The 2008 Mac Pros can also run Tiger if they have an old enough GPU (I believe the X1900 XT and possibly the stock 2600 XT work)
I believe those also had GPU faults, but they aren't as widely documented (like the MBP1,1s version of the X1600)
Maybe those faults are more in the realm of using a really old GPU rather than time bombs like the MBPs.
I'd still vouch for those. Would have snagged one already if they had an official Target Display mode.
But yeah, if you want something that will boot without problems all the way to 2050, than Mac Pro it is.
If you have a MBP with a fixed 8600M, it’s reliable. Tiger runs great on mine.
I think so. The Thunderbolt controller is unaffected by the dGPU. It’s just not receiving a DisplayPort signal anymore.
Theoretically. I’ve not seen anyone try it though. You’ll need a patch to run RX 6x00 series GPUs on a pre-AVX2 (pre-Sandy Bridge) CPU. It’s worth mentioning that I couldn’t get an eGPU working in a patched Mojave install via Thunderbolt on a 2011 MBP.
The other way around is better
Use the ExpressCard slot (one PCIe lane) for USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt (four PCIe lanes) for the eGPU for performance reasons.
Last edited:
I guess the question then becomes, what is 'early Intel'? I think you can separate the Intel Macs into two eras - the first era with 32-bit, Carbon, etc, and the second era with 64-bit, Cocoa-only, etc. And it appears that lots of software, e.g. games from the early 2000s, got recompiled for the first era and left behind at the second. But plenty of systems that can run, say, High Sierra... I suppose no one would really call "early" Intel. Especially once they adopted the unibody design style.
If you already have Tiger or Leopard on a PPC, what is the benefit of also having it on an Intel? Is there a significant body of Intel software that won't run on Snow Leopard, Lion, etc?
By the way... my current thinking is the mid-2011 21.5" with a 6770. They're fairly affordable... and when one thinks about it, the smaller screen is not a bad thing for collecting (takes up less space). And if the GPU dies... well, that bridge can be crossed at the appropriate time?
Being able to experience them at much faster speeds comes to mind. Having never used Tiger or Leopard on a G5, the difference in speed between a G4 and a Core (2) Duo was mind blowing to me. I still have a soft spot for Tiger, and it’s much faster on a Core 2 Duo than a G4. The main reason I own two 2007 MacBook Pros is they run Tiger.
That’s subjective, but for the purposes of this subforum, broadly speaking, anything from 2011 or earlier definitely qualifies. Maybe 2012 too.
Last edited:
We’ve had a few conversations like these on here in the past, and with time, that bar has been slushy and pliable. In the end, once most, if not all company-supported Macs are squarely in the Silicon camp, it’s not beyond the question to mark the distinction of “early” v. “late” at the line of, say, USB 3.0 capability (so, 2012 and later) or presence/absence of the T2 chip (so, 2017 and later). Or, it might fall along a different criteria in between.
Personally, my own yardstick these days is either to demarcate it either as “will/will not run Snow Leopard, even partially” (note: there are ways to get 10.6.8 to run on Ivy Bridge Macs, though not flawlessly), or “non-soldered RAM which isn’t a MacBook Air” (thus eliminating the retina MBPs and 2014-and-later Mac minis). The latter one is a bit sloppy, given the presence of swappable RAM in iMacs for many more years and no provision for Mac Pros, so I tend to stick with the 10.6.8 criteria for now — allowing room for Ivy Bridge unibody Macs/Mac minis and pre-retina iMacs.
So as you can see, the line is still a slushy, pliable one.
Intel Macs aren’t known for their collectibility, but there’re a few notable models such as the black MacBook. It depends on what you’re looking for.
It depends.
If you only care about the maximum compatibility for apps (Rosetta PPC + 32bit apps + Carbon) with the maximum power, you only need a Mac running 10.6, and that leaves you with a lot of subjectively good options.
You could get a bunch of 2011 Macs, with core i5/i7 that will do the job just fine.
But I'd not call those Macs "early Intels". 2011 was 5 years into the transition.
Apple in 2011 was an entirely different company compared to 2006, in the meantime iPhone happened, iPad happened, Multitouch gestures happened, whole different world.
If you're getting an early Intel, you're also doing it for nostalgia purposes, and that also means experiencing the way OSX changed from 10.4 to, say, 10.7. Which was RADICAL in my opinion.
With a 2007 iMac you can create eight partitions for 10.4 - 10.11 and experience all of this without any hacking, or even all the way to Ventura if you do.
Want some Aqua? Got you served.
Exposé? Check. Mission Control? Just reboot.
Multitouch gestures? Just pair the trackpad.
Transition from skeumorphic design to flat? We can do that.
And now I'm getting an itch to get one
Excellent for nostalgia purposes. Is a 2011 more mature? Of course it is. But if you wanted that you'd just get a new system
I assume OP is looking at getting a 2011 because of already having a Power Mac G4 for systems earlier than Snow Leopard. This makes sense to me. Tiger and Leopard on Intel are faster but it’s not necessarily a better experience from these systems on PowerPC. Tiger is an OS that feels far more limiting on Intel than it does on PowerPC.Is a 2011.more mature? Of course it is. But if you wanted that you'd just get a new system
One thing that I've noticed playing with the G4 is that it's... amazing... how fast old software runs on what was a mid/high-end system for that software's time. Also amazing how fast the storage is - updating software, say, is often faster on that old hard drive than on a modern system with an SSD, simply because the size of the software being updated is dramatically smaller. And it's faster to install a point release for Tiger on the G4 than for Ventura on any of my modern Macs. (So yes, if I think Office 2008 on Tiger on a G4 is fairly snappy... the same thing on a C2D must scream)
And then you try to run a web browser. And it's effectively useless. (I have the last build of TenFourFox and... well, the performance is atrocious) And I'm not even trying to run some kind of serious modern businessy web application but just trying to go to Macintosh Garden to download some software. It's so horrible that it makes more sense to download things on my iMac or M1 Max MBP, copy them to a NAS, and grab them on the G4 than to attempt to go to Macintosh Garden directly on the G4.
My opinion is that pretty much every improvement in CPUs, every extra gig of RAM, etc in the past two decades has gone to feed the monstrosity known as HTML, JavaScript, etc.
Exactly. I have the G4 (and wouldn't necessarily mind picking up another G4 machine if I could find a nice iMac G4 that can boot OS 9); I have the mid-2020 iMac that I bought... without necessarily thinking about its collectibility... but that will likely represent the last of the 64-bit Intel era.
So I'm thinking about something in the middle to represent the 32-bit/Carbon/etc Intel era.
This certainly does ring some bells.
I remember when in 2008 SSDs entered the high-end market, and people were still running XP or Leopard / Tiger... it was like instantaneous computing became a thing and no further progress could be possible.
Internet browsing was also regarded as a light activity back then.
Fast forward 15 years, we have incredible hardware at our disposal, and speed for daily tasks goes from "OK" to "meh"... to be honest I can't think of any system as snappy as a 2008-2009 enthusiast-grade PC with SSDs being used back in the day.
I'm using a borrowed M1 MBA with 8GB and I hate this thing, it has been lagging and beachballing all day only because of light multitasking while being plugged to a 1440p display... I want my Pro back
One thing you gain in Tiger on Intel is the ability to virtualise e.g. Linux or Windows so if I needed a “better” web browser while in Tiger, that would be the ticket.
Agreed. Office 2008 was sluggish on my G4 mini though. 2004 was more responsive. Office v.X (2001) was very snappy.
Last edited:
Yup... and if you look at what's happened in those 15 years, basically everything has gotten bigger. A Ventura update is 1.x gigs, so... surprise, even with insanely fast SSDs, that takes a long time to install. Maybe the new updating mechanisms are more secure, more reliable, etc., but they also require a lot more network bandwidth and a lot more storage performance.
I had an 'enthusiast-grade' Windows box from 2009ish with a C2Q, 8 gigs of RAM (the max on that motherboard), an expensive SSD upgrade in 2011 or 2012, etc. Didn't replace that thing until early 2017! But if I dug it out of the closet today, the biggest problem with it would be the lack of RAM to feed modern web things. And the replacement box I built in early 2017 had 32 gigs of RAM, now has 64...
Also worth noting, hard drives got worse starting in the early 2010s - there was a point where they just stopped making the faster drives, then they started SMRing everything (I am sure that plenty of Windows machines have shipped with SMR boot drives), etc. At least Macland was largely spared from this trend since there weren't tons of hard drive-only systems in that era. But the 1TB or whatever HDD you got on your low end Dell laptop in 2019 was not the same 1TB HDD you would have gotten on your high end Dell laptop in 2011; it was much, much, much worse.
And then, of course, you have the worst development ever - the rise of Electron. Now a simple app involves hundreds of megs of storage, hundreds of megs of RAM, etc all because developers and/or their bosses are lazy. And they are so lazy that they don't even want to update for Apple silicon - the ONLY software still running in Rosetta 2 on my M1 Max is Electron or similar garbage.
It's just insane - one of the Electron things I wish I hadn't adopted is Authy. 274 megs of RAM across five processes on my Intel iMac right now. 203 megs on disk. For a bloody app that generates 30 2FA codes and syncs them with the cloud. I don't even want to think about what I could do with 275 megs of RAM and 200 megs of disk on the G4... probably run a full office suite.
So after I posted this, I went to do some research. First version of Electron came out in 2013; I presume that it would take until 2015-2016, maybe a little longer, for things that people use on a regularish basis to be written in Electron. (Microsoft Teams, for example, came out in 2017. And I suspect for many people, especially in Windowsland, Teams is their first introduction to the horror of Electron)
That coincides with me replacing my 8GB C2Q Windows box, but it also coincides... badly... with Apple moving to soldered RAM, small SSDs, etc. And, say, the early 2015 MBA still had 4GB of soldered RAM. 4GB is just... in my mind... not enough if you are multitasking modern web junk (whether it's Electron or running in a browser). Even 8GB is dicey. When did the 13" retina move to 8GB standard?
And look at something like the 2015 MacBook - I wonder if one of the reasons for its poor performance is the fact that it entered the world... right... in the face of this trend. The 2015 MacBook would probably have been a screamer running the type of applications that people were running on 2008-era Intel systems. I don't know when Apple would have started developing the 2015 MacBook, but it's possible this change completely took them by surprise...