Prowling various forums (and Ebay) I notice that many 2009-2011 iMacs suffer from frying GPU cards. The problem frequently is that the price of replacements is near (or more) the value of the iMac being repaired. This is probably sending many iMacs to the landfill prematurely. Several people have reported that some PC MXM 3.0 cards work in these iMacs, but due to the lack of EFI, they have MANY issues. In addition to losing boot screen, they also lose brightness control as well as external displays, and the ability to use bootcamp. I fell quite confident that we could write working EFIs for many cards, most likely the Nvidia ones would be easier, but it is also possible that some AMD cards could be made functional.
In any case, we could allow people to replace dead GT120s with 256 Megs of RAM with GT630s or 650s with more modern support, and no more power draw or heat given off. I can tell you a little known secret, there are already flashed iMac cards being sold, but the sellers are clever enough to not mention it, they are thus able to collect the "Apple Tax" without anyone noticing. What MacVidCards needs is a local Los Angeles partner to work on these with. I do not have the space or time to work on iMacs. But I will soon have the means to test OSX functionality with any and all MXM 3.0 cards. This will lead to the ability to write and test iMac roms to greatly expand the options for iMac repair. The ideal candidate to work with us would be a facility that already does iMac repairs. Replacement cards are hard to come by, we could greatly expand the options, lower prices, and allow a repairer/reseller the chance to market the cards. To really and truly test the cards would mean eventually trying them in each and every Mac that offered MXM 3.0 cards. The good news is that once they are tested and finished, it will be much easier to crank them out. Currently used iMac GT120s fetch a minimum of $200, while new ones get $600-700. We could make it possible to offer MUCH better cards, for less money. And that would also allow the "real" Apple cards to drop in price. Win/Win. So, who has some space and time? I'm confident that there is serious money to be made, while simultaneously doing some serious good for the Mac/iMac community.
2 Comments
Ricardo Ibanez
3/2/2018 09:27:26 pm
Hi,
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4/16/2019 12:47:25 pm
Thank you for nice article. I hope it’s a very helpful to us. Because we are very update generation. So we also used many other digital computer or mobile. So sometimes we faced many other problem from mobile or computer. We also provide mobile computer repair in Los Angeles.
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