Certain iMacs from the early 2010s and late 2000s have an MXM GPU slot inside them, allowing for the graphics card to be replaced or upgraded. All 27″ and 21.5″ 2009 – 2011 iMacs have an MXM 3.0 slot, with the exception of the late 2009 21.5″ iMac with the base GeForce 9400m GPU. MXM 3.0 is an interface standard used across for a long enough time that inadvertently you can pop in a much newer GPU into your old iMac than what it normally supports. Thus enabling/easing the graphical hardware acceleration of the user interface in macOS, allowing for the unsupported Mac to be useable once more!
Fresh to the Low End Mac mailbag from FaceBook User Edward Crain:
“This didn’t go easily, but today I got it done finally.”
“This is my third 2011 iMac graphics card replacement. A first one done a few years ago was more or less done by a local tech, so I paid for him to install a K2100m and do the flashing back around 2020 when it was popular to get Catalina on one of these. I didn’t mind paying at that point for the work since I got the machine from a friend for $0.”
(Above: The old AMD Radeon HD 6xxx MXM Graphics card)
“Then, the iMac I had for some years before all that finally lost its card. I did the bake thing and that worked remarkably well for eight months till I decided to brave doing a mod myself and got a K4100m for that one. It was pre-flashed. I paid more for that feature but it went off without a snag and is still working around here.”
“Getting more brave, I bought this particular iMac here just to get a chance to do the work, but preemptively. The unit was one of the best ones—the 3.4 GHz i7 and had full RAM and arrived here for a bit over $100. For some months I waited to see if the stock GPU was going to get wonky but nothing happened so far. I decided to try my hand at getting an unflashed card to see if I could save a few bucks and get the experience. ”
(Above: Shaving down the heatsink to fit the Quadro K4100M)
“The thing is—you saw this earlier—the K4100m I got at first was unflashed and frankly, assumed to work, but I could not get it to work at all. The system not only gave me no indicator light, but the time I did actually manage to get the SSH in and messing around in the GRML environment I got a notice that there was no Quadro adapter found.
I notified the seller and said I was sure I got the right part since it’s a well known model to use for exactly this purpose but nothing worked. He sent me a replacement and had no terms attached. Along the way I had encountered with that first card, no luck at even getting a proper SSH in. I could never figure out why the machine could be found on the network but not in an SSH endeavor. That cost some time and taught me nothing.”
(Above: New thermal paste and pads)
“Today I put the newer card in and at first was dismayed at seeing no third indicator light. I almost wanted to get sad, but instead I cursed. After many expletives, I took a close look at the exact fit of the card to the heat sink and saw that the thermal pads made it a bit irregular and seemed to put a bit of warp in things. I had stacked thin and thick pads in most places and where needed I removed one layer. I have no idea if that really did anything but maybe? The third LED still wasn’t on but I tried the SSH in and that worked, then moved through the flashing steps and got no obstructions, and flashed on the first try. Yay.”
“I did all the work with minimal reconnection of assorted fans/speakers/doohickeys so I counted the flashing as a provisional win. Where today really went weird is in getting the Sequoia SSD back in the game, making sure the OCLP app is writing good properties for the hardware and getting the patches done. I’ve done OCLP installs/upgrades/patching maybe 100 times or more but this got into some weeds and I had to do the Safe Boot thing to straighten it out. And a few re-applications of patches.”
“There was for a while an odd matter of my back panel USB ports not working at all—but using an Apple Thunderbolt Display and the ports there allowed me to use my Apple keyboard and wired mouse. I took some time away for the evening then came back and found that all the USB buses were properly seen in the profiler, and they actually worked as they should, when just hours earlier, they didn’t. Weird, but I’ll take it.
Anyhow, it’s a nice, clean, beautiful thing again. Top specs for the model/year. Latest OS.”
