What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[B S Magnet]

While waiting on the last of things to come in for my pending iMac upgrade, I felt like doing some kind of tinkering.

So I pulled out my early 2011 13-inch i5 MBP, a ship of Theseus I shelved after a dozen years of heavy daily use (superseded by the late 2011 i7 I picked up a couple of years ago). Keyboard, fan, top case, wifi card, wifi flat cable, hard drive cable, ODD, and battery have all been replaced at least once. There might be other components I’m forgetting. [EDIT: yes, clutch cover and feet.]

I wanted to try a one-two combo of “put a piece of credit card or points awards card beneath the lower RAM slot to get beyond the failure to POST” and “loosen the RAM bracket screws a quarter-turn or so” methods. When I put it away, the upper RAM slot was the only of the two working.

After several different variations, I cut and added some adhesive-backed black foam padding (the kind used for film camera light seals, maybe 1mm in thickness); atop that, I added a cut piece of an old points awards card. After several different tries, I managed to finally get the lower slot to co-operate.

(This lower slot failed in 2013, after which I relied solely on an 8GB stick in the upper slot.)

For fun, I dug out the OEM HDD from the mid-2009 13-inch MBP I bought back in early September that year (it shipped with Snow Leopard 10.6.0, then about one week old). This is the original HDD from which the extremely customized 10.6.8 build found on two of my current laptops today are descended.

I was greeted by a blast from the distant past I’d long forgotten: the rEFIt bootloader. (So I went through a rEFIt and rEFInd phase, ok?)

Indeed, the two, 4GB sticks of slow af 1067MHz DDR3 RAM now appear. (This was the same 1067MHz RAM I was trying in the early 2011 15-inch MBP last month, but to no avail, as it demanded at least 1333MHz.) I’m hesitant, but I may let memtest run overnight on these 4GB sticks, just to see how the lower slot fares.

The desktop, menubar, and Dock (not seen here) are a snapshot of my life frozen in August 2011 (the month I ruined the 2009 MBP); upon buying the early 2011 i5 replacement, I transferred the OS to a 64GB SSD and the rest to a 750GB HDD, leaving the 2009 OEM HDD in a box of old HDDs).

Hashtag throwbackmonday…

 

[DCBassman]

2011 and earlier Macs: not supposed to work properly on post-High Sierra, right?
Then how come the early MBP i7 2GHz will fire up Maps and, seemingly, Garageband, without issue, when running @dosdude1 - patched Catalina? Just as a twist, this particular machine refuses to run *anything* else, at all...
So I may return the late 2011 to Catalina also, here's why.
The band I was in for 12 years played its last gig on NYE 2018. The frontman emigrated with his young family to the coast of northern Queensland, Australia. They are returning for a long holiday in March 2025, and we're playing two reunion gigs in our local 400-seater, the first of which sold out in 24 hours.
This means I need some compatibility with the system used by Sam in Oz, as it might ease remote working until March.
Exciting times!

 

[headlessmike]

2011 and earlier Macs: not supposed to work properly on post-High Sierra, right?
Then how come the early MBP i7 2GHz will fire up Maps and, seemingly, Garageband, without issue, when running @dosdude1 - patched Catalina? Just as a twist, this particular machine refuses to run *anything* else, at all...
So I may return the late 2011 to Catalina also, here's why.
The band I was in for 12 years played its last gig on NYE 2018. The frontman emigrated with his young family to the coast of northern Queensland, Australia. They are returning for a long holiday in March 2025, and we're playing two reunion gigs in our local 400-seater, the first of which sold out in 24 hours.
This means I need some compatibility with the system used by Sam in Oz, as it might ease remote working until March.
Exciting times!

It's not always the case, but often Apple leaves drivers in for one release after a Mac is officially supported. My 2012 mini, which was officially supported by Catalina but not Big Sur, still had GPU support in Big Sur even though none of the supported Macs used that generation of GPU. It also means that most software still works fine with that unsupported hardware. It's usually when you move ahead a few generations of macOS that you run into trouble, e.g., with lack of metal support etc.

 

[DCBassman]

It's not always the case, but often Apple leaves drivers in for one release after a Mac is officially supported. My 2012 mini, which was officially supported by Catalina but not Big Sur, still had GPU support in Big Sur even though none of the supported Macs used that generation of GPU. It also means that most software still works fine with that unsupported hardware. It's usually when you move ahead a few generations of macOS that you run into trouble, e.g., with lack of metal support etc.

Ahh, good to know, thanks for the information.

 

[rampancy]

I wanted to try a one-two combo of “put a piece of credit card or points awards card beneath the lower RAM slot to get beyond the failure to POST” and “loosen the RAM bracket screws a quarter-turn or so” methods. When I put it away, the upper RAM slot was the only of the two working.

Oh man, those kinds of failures are the worst; it reminds me of when I was stuffing my 700 Mhz iBook G3 full of shims to try to get the GPU working.

I don't suppose you'd be able to reflow the solder to get the lower RAM slot to work? 😢

 

[B S Magnet]

Oh man, those kinds of failures are the worst; it reminds me of when I was stuffing my 700 Mhz iBook G3 full of shims to try to get the GPU working.

I don't suppose you'd be able to reflow the solder to get the lower RAM slot to work? 😢

The trouble is just getting to the lower RAM slot BGA solder points: they exist beneath the through-the-board solders for the upper RAM slot. The upper RAM slot solders would first need to be undone (no thank you!) before one could even see the lowers.

I honestly don’t know what kind of sorcery is involved to access/solder the lower slots, since from what I can suss, the plastic RAM bracket is a single piece, not two pieces (or maybe it is two pieces stacked atop each other and held down by the four screws, idk). At this point, so long as I don’t futz with the lower slot kludge-fix, the system should run fine with both RAM slots. Maybe dosdude1 knows, and maybe he’s even done some work on unibody MBP RAM bridges (as they’re all of the same basic design), but I won’t bug him about that.


My lack of motivation to do more reflects a pending decision: I feel I’m on the verge of selling the laptop, as I don’t see a future for it in my life.

It’s kind of a maudlin sensation, to let go of this Apple-refurbished purchase, literally the last Mac I bought new. The laptop is what I used for my masters field work and writing the subsequent thesis; to write essays and scholarship; to bring new words into the world (including one now in the OED — but I’ll leave that a mystery to all of you, in perpetuity); to spin many, many DJing sets (and endless music archival work); to do a lot of paid work; to scan a lot of film and to do touch-up/restorations; and it has travelled with me across two continents, four nation-states, and at least a dozen major cities. There’s even more, but they’re things I’ll keep to myself (and no, nothing NSFW, just… the personal and the sundry).

It has weathered so, so much, and it is still working.

But the above ought to explain why it’s also such a ship of Theseus.

It was the laptop on which I grew comfortable tinkering with the internals of Macs (beyond a few earlier forays inside the clamshell iBook). All that writing? Three keyboards across two top case assemblies. When the lid is closed, it still looks mostly unused (minus one light spot-dent). But open (or, if looking at its bottom plate), you can see subtle signs of extensive use. Three of the screw holes either go past the plate (be sure to stick with shouldered screws for the bottom row of 13-inch models, kids!) or the threads stripped from the innumerable times it’s been opened.

Whenever and however it sells for however little it sells, I’ll miss it (and all the personal signifiers I’ll forever ascribe to it), but I also won’t miss the unavoidable compromise of the literal hardware specs. There was a reason I wanted a late 2011 i7 13-inch, but doing that took a lot longer than I planned originally. And I’m really not into the hoarding thing (despite, yes, having donor parts for Macs I do still use), so letting go becomes a part of moving on.

 

[ToniCH]

I might as well get rid of Yosemite and El Capitan and use the drive space for Windows 10 and perhaps a Linux distro. The only niggle with Mavericks (and Yosemite is also affected by this) is a display glitch on my LED TV when connected to the Mac Pro using HDMI or DVI where the image of automatically zoomed, causing areas of the display to vanish and I have to repeatedly tick and untick the overscan option before they return - but with the penalty of a smaller screen area. With VGA, everything is fine.

It didn't occur with El Capitan on the same TV and the zoom issue with Mavericks doesn't happen when the Mac Pro is connected to my other TV. Odd but it's not the end of the world and VGA is ok anyway.

Hi, did you ever figure this out?

I have a Panasonic TV and a 2012 Mac Mini, resolution I use is 1080p. When I use the HDMI the picture is always overscanned so the menus and dock are outside the screen. When I go to screen-options and click overscan slider it immediately goes to normal. If the computer sleeps its again overscanned when it wakes up and again I have to click the slider (I don't have to move it, it remembers what I set it the last time) to get the pic to normal size.

This happens with both Mojave and Catalina. And both directly from the Mini or when the eGPU is connected (but still the HDMI is plugged directly to the Mini). I only tried once to plug the HDMI-cable to the eGPU and I think it did the same thing (but I get no boot screen so I prefer it being plugged to the Mini).

What to do to fix this?

 

[TheShortTimer]

Hi, did you ever figure this out?

No, the 2006 MP is currently dismantled.

I have a Panasonic TV and a 2012 Mac Mini, resolution I use is 1080p. When I use the HDMI the picture is always overscanned so the menus and dock are outside the screen. When I go to screen-options and click overscan slider it immediately goes to normal. If the computer sleeps its again overscanned when it wakes up and again I have to click the slider (I don't have to move it, it remembers what I set it the last time) to get the pic to normal size.

This happens with both Mojave and Catalina. And both directly from the Mini or when the eGPU is connected (but still the HDMI is plugged directly to the Mini). I only tried once to plug the HDMI-cable to the eGPU and I think it did the same thing (but I get no boot screen so I prefer it being plugged to the Mini).

What to do to fix this?

Ironically our situations are reversed. I also have a Panasonic TV but the overscan issue doesn't occur with it. Maybe a script could be created that will reset the overscan after the Mini resumes from sleep? Unfortunately doing this is beyond my knowledge...

 

[ToniCH]

Ironically our situations are reversed. I also have a Panasonic TV but the overscan issue doesn't occur with it. Maybe a script could be created that will reset the overscan after the Mini resumes from sleep? Unfortunately doing this is beyond my knowledge...

Yeah, me too.

 

[TheShortTimer]

Yeah, me too.

Perhaps members of our community who possess this knowledge can offer guidance.

 

[B S Magnet]

I’m in the middle of the A1418 upgrade project.

Why doesn’t iFixit warn for the need of — much less sell — N95 masks?

My lordt. I’ll need a shower after doing just this.

(also, I may have botched a key connector early in disassembly… will look into it later.)


EDIT to add:

Hi there!

This is a rest stop before moving forward with adhesive strips, and then setting up the internal SSDs.

Look closely!

---

Before (earlier today):

After (now):

Until it’s all sealed up and booting from solid state, I should be cautious, but… ::success kid meme::

More to follow!

 

[chaosbunny]

Updated my white Mid 2010 MacBook from Montery to Sonoma. Now my bedroom media consumption Mac has 2 more years of security updates, yay! So far Sonoma doesn't run any slower than Montery once it's booted, just the boot process takes a little longer. I can live with that.

 

[Amethyst1]

After (now):

Congratulations I‘d be interested in thermal results with the higher-TDP i7. And does it Turbo Boost fully (I remember the i5 didn’t)?
The SSD (the model number suggests it’s a WD Blue SN550) can do PCIe 3.0 ×4 but the iMac does PCIe 2.0 ×2.

 

[B S Magnet]

Congratulations I‘d be interested in thermal results with the higher-TDP i7. And does it Turbo Boost fully (I remember the i5 didn’t)?
The SSD (the model number suggests it’s a WD Blue SN550) can do PCIe 3.0 ×4 but the iMac does PCIe 2.0 ×2.

Cheers! Parts of working on it were a bit stressful. Dealing with the exposed power supply card was a good example. Dealing with the sheer amount of dust inside was another.

Before shutting everything down, I ran Geekbench 2 and 3, as well as Cinebench 23 and recording boot-up times, to make a snapshot of the “before”.

Midway during the middle of having the computer in pieces, I realized I had forgotten to screencap the iStat readings. The best I have, unfortunately, is the iStat readings on the menubar in the screencaps I made (I can parse for y’all what those are a bit later). Provisionally, the numbers (between a heavily clogged case with i5 2.9 and a cleaned out case for the i7 3.5) don’t seem much different insofar as temperatures — maybe a tad cooler, but wattage consumption is definitely up in the CPU package. I probably saved a bit of consumption from removing the energy draw of the HDD spindle motor for the sold state which went in, although I don’t know by how much.

When I was most of the way through putting it all back together, I also forgot to add in a m.2 heatsink cooler kit I wanted to try out (for, yes, a Blue SN550, which I had bought in 2020 to replace the failed Apple SSD in my rMBP). I’ll live. 🤷‍♀️

The 2.9 i5 did work with Turbo Boost (maybe it was the soldered 2.7 i5 you’re thinking of?). Its turbo boost max, however, was 3.3GHz — where it pretty much stayed whilst doing Handbrake batch encodes. I haven’t yet run new benchmarks (it’s lying flat, face down, on a towel and being clamped for a day as the new adhesive strips — hopefully — set in place).

 

[Amethyst1]

The 2.9 i5 did work with Turbo Boost (maybe it was the soldered 2.7 i5 you’re thinking of?). Its turbo boost max, however, was 3.3GHz [...]

Yeah, the 4570S did boost, but not to the max 3.6 GHz. So I wonder if the 4771 goes all the way to 3.9 GHz.

 

[rampancy]

I’m in the middle of the A1418 upgrade project.

Why doesn’t iFixit warn for the need of — much less sell — N95 masks?

My lordt. I’ll need a shower after doing just this.

(also, I may have botched a key connector early in disassembly… will look into it later.)

Congrats on getting it to work! Are you talking about the amount of dust inside your machine? Yes, when I cleaned out the fans in my A1418, there had been a lot of dust in there...good thing I got three cans of compressed air at Dollarama. And congrats on not getting shocked by the power supply.

Do you know what might have happened with the botched connector? I remember that the first time I powered up the iMac to test out my new RAM and SSD, the Mac didn't power up at all because I'd forgotten to reconnect the small connector at the bottom right-ish section of the Mac, close to the right speaker. Good thing I was just holding it together with duct tape at the time.

 

[B S Magnet]

Congrats on getting it to work! Are you talking about the amount of dust inside your machine? Yes, when I cleaned out the fans in my A1418, there had been a lot of dust in there...good thing I got three cans of compressed air at Dollarama. And congrats on not getting shocked by the power supply.

Cheers! Yah, the power supply warnings remind me of why the thought of ever opening an old CRT terrified me (and why I never tried).

I didn’t even think to get cans of air at — let’s be honest in the year of our common era 2024 — Fiverama/Laurierama. I just used the same dusting brush I’ve relied on for years (a really old, but soft Aveda brush I once used for loose-powder makeup before I pared down from using makeup during the aughts), and physically blowing air at things like that big finned grille.

Even had I relied on canned air, the amount of grime on my sweater and on the floor was somewhat staggering, even for someone who’s cleaned out a filthy G5 tower. I am kind of amazed the single Delta fan inside — and the maybe cooling design by Apple’s designers, given the design constraints of “thin” — is as good as it is. (The 2007 iMac, by contrast, relies on three fans.) I opened the fan, dusted it out, and gave the spindle a couple of drops of the same oil I used for reviving my laptop fans.

Do you know what might have happened with the botched connector?

I tended to it. It was OK. And it was all on my end: when first opening the glass, knowing there were cables, I still opened it too much and it pulled out the LVDS connector. Cue dread. But after looking carefully at the connector itself and also at the plug, it seemed the only thing affected was one end of the connector shield, which I gently mended with a spudger.

I exhaled a massive sigh of relief when first powering on and holding Option, followed by getting the boot menu. My fear, during those first few seconds, was that the backlight was getting power, but the display was not getting signal. I’m so accustomed to boot menu screens on laptops being grey, not black (as with desktops). Fortunately, everything seems OK.

I remember that the first time I powered up the iMac to test out my new RAM and SSD, the Mac didn't power up at all because I'd forgotten to reconnect the small connector at the bottom right-ish section of the Mac, close to the right speaker.

Me too. I didn’t properly seat the power button connector into the power supply, so it was sort of half in there when I re-opened to figure out why the system wasn’t powering on. That was the only connector which seemed to not be in place.

Good thing I was just holding it together with duct tape at the time.

Ah yes. The RedGreenFixit.com instructions are a Canadian exclusive. It’s a terrible shame no one outside of Canada can access its tear-down guides, not even with a VPN!

 

[headlessmike]

Updated my white Mid 2010 MacBook from Montery to Sonoma. Now my bedroom media consumption Mac has 2 more years of security updates, yay! So far Sonoma doesn't run any slower than Montery once it's booted, just the boot process takes a little longer. I can live with that.

I have the same machine and my experience matches yours. In some areas, like when using Safari, I think Sonoma even performs better than older versions even on this ancient hardware. I’m tempted to try Sequoia on it to see how it performs.

 

[TheShortTimer]

I have the same machine and my experience matches yours. In some areas, like when using Safari, I think Sonoma even performs better than older versions even on this ancient hardware. I’m tempted to try Sequoia on it to see how it performs.

It's certainly an interesting paradox. I'm having similar experiences with Ventura on a couple of unsupported machines.

Earlier today I took part in a Zoom session using my 2010 11" C2D MBA w/ Catalina and there wasn't a second of stuttering, lagging or freezing.

 

[B S Magnet]

I’m in the middle of the A1418 upgrade project.

Why doesn’t iFixit warn for the need of — much less sell — N95 masks?

My lordt. I’ll need a shower after doing just this.

(also, I may have botched a key connector early in disassembly… will look into it later.)


EDIT to add:

Hi there!

This is a rest stop before moving forward with adhesive strips, and then setting up the internal SSDs.

Look closely!

---

Before (earlier today):

View attachment 2431953


After (now):

View attachment 2431954


Until it’s all sealed up and booting from solid state, I should be cautious, but… ::success kid meme::

More to follow!

Well, OK…

i5-4570S, Geekbenches 2 and 3:




i7-4771, Geekbenches 2 and 3:



Worth it? [Y/y]

The extra credit flex: posting my iMac for sale locally for… $780. Then, wait for this clown to reduce their price, then re-post my iMac at $10 below their price to see how long that can go on before one actually sells.

 

[DCBassman]

This means I need some compatibility with the system used by Sam in Oz

Turns out, not so much, so the music stuff will be Audacity on Windows.
And some other mentions above about old MBPs running recent macOS: I've decided I'll keep the late 2011 running the oldest supported version, using the newest OCLP. As mentioned above, this should keep the gotchas to a minimum. So Ventura 13.7 installing as I type.

 

[Amethyst1]

i7-4771, Geekbenches 2 and 3:

Time to rename the startup disk to velocità

 

[B S Magnet]

Time to rename the startup disk to velocità

Speed/velocity has nothing to do with sound, though!

This machine is named sonologia, so its drives use names adjacent to its name: the now-PCI-e boot volume AMPIEZZA (amplitude); SATA data volume FREQUENZA (frequency); and (tentatively, for overflow, an external drive with the old HDD) TEMPO (time).

Basically, once the Mac gets its name, all volumes henceforth for that Mac are named in keeping with that name. For example, the newly added lepidopterologia (the name for my late 2011 13-inch MBP, previously known as morfologia until morfologia was migrated to the early 2011 15-inch MBP). The drive in there, until I can finalize it, is named FARFALLA (butterfly). [It ought to be a word familiar to anyone who knows the pasta named after — and resembling — a butterfly’s form factor, albeit as plural “farfalle“, but the study of butterflies and moths has nothing to do with pasta.]

And so on. With Mac naming, at least post-2004, I’m an old creature of habit.

 

[B S Magnet]

Well, OK…

i5-4570S, Geekbenches 2 and 3:

View attachment 2432587View attachment 2432588


i7-4771, Geekbenches 2 and 3:

View attachment 2432589View attachment 2432590

Worth it? [Y/y]

The extra credit flex: posting my iMac for sale locally for… $780. Then, wait for this clown to reduce their price, then re-post my iMac at $10 below their price to see how long that can go on before one actually sells.

More before/after stuff:

Spoiler: Boot-up times

This one’s really perceptible.
There was a reason why I never powered it down before: boot-up times were excruciating.

High Sierra 10.13.6	i5-4570S 8GB RAM/1TB 5400rpm OEM HDD​	i7-4771 16GB RAM/500GB m.2 NVMe SSD​
Button power-on to login screen	2:11.72​	0:16.11​
Login to desktop (with all start-up items loaded)	2:45:12​	0:07.83​
TOTAL TIME TO DESKTOP	4:56.84 (296.74 seconds)​	0:23.94 (23.94 seconds)​

Spoiler: Turbo Boost confirmation

I also learnt Cinebench locks the CPU at the rated clock speed, blocking it from using Turbo Boost. I discovered this whilst running Intel Power Gadget at the same time: starting Cinebench drops the requested clock speed from 3.9GHz (Turbo boost) to 3.5GHz (nominal). This is seen in the seconds-long change in the middle of these graphs:

Spoiler: Cinebench R23 comparison

Speaking of, before/after with Cinebench R23.

This wasn’t that exciting, but hey. It would be interesting to see how the GeForce GPU would handle rendering, but this’ll do.

Curiously, the old CPU kept the iGPU locked at 1.15GHz at all times. When I first put the new CPU in, the iGPU registered at the expected technical spec of 1.20GHz, but this evening, it dropped to 1.10GHz and I have no idea why. (Also, when looking at my three-year-old notes, I was planning originally to find an i7-4770K, whose specs are identical to the i7-4771, with sole exception to the iGPU clock speed of 1.25GHz. I’m wondering whether one of these two GPUs were ordered by only one customer (i.e., Apple or Dell or Asus whomever).

But I’m not going to worry about it.

Spoiler: Repair highlights, in pictures

Fleabay had i7-4771 CPUs made either in Malaysia or in Costa Rica:




Messy innards:




Uh-oh. This could be more gross than first thought…




Yah, this isn’t ideal:




Ewwwwww…




I was filthy, but this no longer was. It’s nice Apple kept the CPU and RAM so close — just not so close they’re fused as one SoC.

Spoiler: Quick glow-up

Not exciting to look at, because I keep this on the worn out work desk on which I take apart Macs.

But now you have a sense of where this newly refreshed iMac lives (and its sole distinction of being personalized).

 

[Amethyst1]

I also learnt Cinebench locks the CPU at the rated clock speed, blocking it from using Turbo Boost.

As Core Average reads 3.86 GHz, I assume Turbo Boost is fully working? yes > /dev/null in Terminal will test that.

I’m wondering whether one of these two GPUs were ordered by only one customer (i.e., Apple or Dell or Asus whomever).

Do you mean the 4771? The 4770K was a retail affair.

Messy innards:

And post-its. I love that personal touch.