Pair this with a Wifi card from a 2015 or newer MacBook or iMac and you will have a fully supported iMac with Handoff etc working. Nvidia cards are supported up to Big Sur.Īll cards are supported in 21.5” and 27” iMacs with the exception of the Late 2009 21.5” Core 2 Duo. The size “A” will work in both.Īs of Feb 2021, the recommended card which has Monterey support is the M5100 Firepro. There is a size “B” card for the 27” iMacs and a size “A” card for the 21.5” Macs. There are 2 cards that I have found which offer boot screen and Metal support. Unfortunalty with these iMacs, It can be done but requires a more up to date graphics card.
Special credits must do to DosDude who created the Mojave and Catalina Patcher tools to allow people to run these operating systems on their older unsupported Macs. Note, As this guide is now over 3 years old, time has marched on and not been kind to our 2009-2011 iMacs, The main issue we are all facing is the lack of Metal support with the AMD cards (If they haven’t failed already) As most of you are probably all aware, there are some great developers on the scene that have devoted a lot of time into keeping our old unsupported Macs on the road. Good luck and save yourselves a few quid.ĮDIT - The M8900 Firepro is the same card so can be flashed with the Apple firmware in the same way as the Dell card. Lastly, as pointed out, if you have an iMac 27" Mid 2011 with issues, the GPU is most likely the cause and Apple will fix it if it's no older than four years, because it's a recognized issue.Īpple refused to fix this one because it was sold in 2011 but if you want to fight Apple, maybe that'll work too - I chose to fix it myself instead. You can get a working card on Ebay or Aliexpress - any MXM 3.0 card pulled from an iMac should be fine.
I found out Apple uses special firmware and for a card to work it needs an EFI flash with Apple firmware.Ī card without Apple firmware will simply result in a black screen.Ī friend of mine did suggest I could remove the BIOS/EFI-chip from the original board and reflow it onto a cheaper card - but that will probably be too complicated for a lot of people and I already had a new card on the way.Ĭards that already have Apple firmware (pulled from iMacs) are interchangeable though - I upgraded from the 1GB 6970M to the 2GB version. "Would a 6970M card for a Dell Alienware laptop or another card with the same chip as one of the iMac 2011 models work?'.''Are all MXM 3.0 B cards compatible or does the card need Apple firmware?".