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Thoughts on installing ML on older iMacs?

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Nichod

Nichod

Joined
Oct 4, 2010
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66
Motherboard
iMac
CPU
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Graphics
ATI Radeon X1600 with 128MB GDDR3 SDRAM
Mac
  1. iMac
  2. MacBook
  3. Mac mini
Classic Mac
  1. 0
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
Seems with the addition of the new Mt. Lion forum section this thread got stuck in an odd section. Any mod willing to move it to one that makes sense?
 
Potential problems, ML requires 2GBs of RAM (Don't know how much you have) and ML is 64bit only. And correct me if I'm wrong 64Bit support didn't come until SL which was '09. But by definition, IT IS an unsupported Mac. As long as your CPU supports 64Bit (Which it does) you should be alright. But why upgrade if your Graphics isn't supported?
 
Potential problems, ML requires 2GBs of RAM (Don't know how much you have) and ML is 64bit only. And correct me if I'm wrong 64Bit support didn't come until SL which was '09. But by definition, IT IS an unsupported Mac. As long as your CPU supports 64Bit (Which it does) you should be alright. But why upgrade if your Graphics isn't supported?
Click to expand...

Well I'll have 3.x GBs of RAM in a couple of days. (2x 2GB sticks) I see no reason why the x1600 can't run with QE in ML. I expect I'll have to hack some things to get it to work. I'll just have to hope that some hacker who knows a bit more than I do, comes up with a solution I can follow. There are quite a few Macs with the x1600 in them, I imagine someone will come up with a solution. I do know that 64-bit drivers do exist for Windows and Linux for this same GPU.
 
I thought the memory topped out at 2 gb, or is it raised by the 64 bit system?
I have one of these with a 1gig and 512 mb chip and wouln't switch if 2 is the limit, but if I can grab a 2 gig chip and run 3 gigs, it would be worth it.
 
There's a custom firmware on netkas that flashes the 4,1 iMac to 5,1 and removes the 2GB limit. You'll need to create an account to get the download. (http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,1122.0.html)

Recently did it on my early 2006 iMac and SL 10.6.8 has been running smoothly and sees 3gigs (with 4 gigs of actual RAM). Just today, I swapped out the T2500 CD for a T7200 C2D ($46 on Amazon). SL immediately recognized it as 64-bit and was happily running many programs as such. I'm building a Unibeast USB drive at the moment and will try that to install Lion. Would love to use the Firewire target method, but my other Mac is on the other side of the house and I'm too lazy to bring one to the other. :-/

As others have mentioned, the graphics card is unsupported on ML, so 10.7 is going to be the limit for my machine.

-Joe
 
do you have a link for that 2 gig chip?
I'm staying on 10.6.8, but I want this iMac to run for a decade more.
 
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