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Comment by matthberg | Hacker News Reader

MXM cards unfortunately seem to be incredibly niche and vendor locked with BIOs whitelists, but allowing for swapable GPUs on laptops would be amazing for e-waste reduction and upgradability. It's a shame the Framework laptops don't support them, it seems right up their alley.

Cool to see a project messing with them though!

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The problem is it adds quite a bit of thickness to the device. The framework 16 solution where it slides into the back is better, but we will see how well upgrades are supported.

Surprisingly the older iMacs are very upgradeable because of their socketed CPU and MXM GPU. I recently received a free 2010 iMac and was able to upgrade the dual core i3 CPU to a quad core i7, which then boosted the RAM limit to 32GB. I also grabbed an $8 FirePro M4000 MXM GPU from a dell laptop and flashed it for MacOS compatibility .

This old 2010 iMac now has a quad core cpu, 32GB RAM, and a metal capable GPU running the current version of macOS Sonoma. It's running great, and I can essentially run every app on the machine without ever hitting swap, unlike my 8GB MacBook Air.

Would you happen to have a breakdown on how to flash the gpu?

This thread on MacRumors has everything you need to know.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2011-imac-graphics-card...

Ha, I remember that thread!

I did the same with a dumpster find in 2020. I saw the guy hauling and depositing it, so I asked and got it (2011 iMac 27" with maxed out specs at ordering time - radeon 9800, i7, 16gb ram, ssd+2tb hdd. Almost mint condition).

It had of course 2 issues:

- backlight was dead on one half of the screen

- infamous radeon BGA soldering issue, intermittent glitches & os freezing when it had warmed up

I resoldered the backlight connector (apparently broke off the pcb under mechanical stress) and swapped in a used $20 Nvidia Quadro that I had flashed with nick's hacked rom from the above thread.

I did not want to do some hackintosh mods to the OS so i went with (iirc) mavericks and sold it on classifieds for $430 after noone in my circle wanted it. I was also able to sell off the mxm radeon 9800/2GB for $30, placed the ad just for curiosity about it's resale value in such a broken state. :)

The money was just by-catch, the real joy always comes from resurrecting broken things (for me).

Where is your blog about this??

So I can post it to hacker news :/

No seriously I have a could have 2010 iMac laying around. How much was the i7?

I have thought about blogging a bit but there are already many people blogging who are much more knowledgable than me. :)

This iMac is the 21" model, they have a smaller PSU and cooling, so the most powerful chip you can install is the i7-860s (82W CPU). I paid $25 from aliexpress.

If you have the 27" iMac you can install the i7-860 (without s) that is a 95W CPU and can boost to higher clock speeds. This is also a more common chip so likely cheaper than the i7-860s.

Both chips should boost the default max of 16GB RAM to 32GB RAM.

Damn, that's a sweet set of upgrades. And shoving in a decent SSD too?

I just got given a 2010 MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM, and well, it's kinda sad :(

Thanks haha and yes I also installed an SSD. Unfortunately this iMac is only SATA II, so that limits the speeds a bit, but it is still much faster than an HDD.

Apple's desktops of that era were quite upgradeable, but those old MacBook Air's were the beginning of what Apple devices became today.

Maybe but it doesn't matter because they're not using it directly. The card was AGP/PCI while MXM on the laptop is PCIe, so they had to create an adapter including a AGP/PCI-to-PCIe bridge. In this case, they shoved this graphics card with its adapter into a Dell Precision M4800 released in 2013 because they needed to run Windows XP. They also created another PCB as a PCIe 1x adapter to run it on desktops.

The card was probably intended to work with a specific model of gaming or workstation laptop from 2000 but it's doubtful any made it past the prototype stage. Maybe Dell or Acer sold one or two models of it.

(My Voodoo2's are jealous BTW.)

I think you're confused - this is a from-scratch new design, not an old prototype. There's no adapter other than the desktop mount, the VSA-100 is directly mounted to the board that plugs into the laptop.

We had to develop a new interface for swappable GPUs to make the graphics card and mainboard co-planar. MXM requires the graphics card to be stacked above the mainboard, which results in really thick laptops. This is part of why MXM is largely dead for consumer usage and lives on mostly for industrial and embedded applications.

Unrelated to MXM but I've struggled with the same problem you described (swappable GPUs on laptops). The current solution I've settled with is to get a laptop with a pcie gen4x4 nvme slot, install an oculink adapter on it and connect my full size RTX 3090 to it.

No performance diff far as I can see (oculink on pcie gen4x4 should have ~64GBps bw) and still super portable. and I can finally upgrade the CPU/display and GPU independently

Posting a correction since I can no longer edit the original. It's actually 64Gbps (bits not bytes)

I think as power consumption only gets worse for GPUs, external GPUs is the solution that makes the most sense...

Or better design ? /s

Will be interesting to see if AMD's Strix Point can perform. Basically, radically beef up the graphics unit in an APU.

(Doesn't make it upgradable of course, but could offer a better choice for people that want a gaming laptop that's also an ultrabook)

IDK, we have all of the unused space behind the screen of a laptop. Why are there no attachable modules that take advantage of that?

It would be ideal to have a PCIe Thunderbolt connector that allows you to attach a GPU that maglocks to the back of the screen while in use, and any manufacturer could make their own variations. Thunderbolt can easily send 100w of power. Wouldn't be on desktop scales but it would be enough to make me happy.

Adding weight to the screen makes it more awkward to handle, particularly on a lap. Same problem tablets with attached keyboards have.

This is true to a point.

In my mind this is ~4 oz. of extra weight, I feel like sufficiently strong hinges and just enough weight in the base would be fine for that little extra though.

If anyone knows of a guide or layman-accessible reference talking more about them (compatibility, bios hacks, part sourcing best practices) I'd love to hear about it.

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