Warranty is up - CPU Upgrade Query

Hm.

Seriously, nobody's done this surgery?

People are managing to place current GPUs in these things!

You gotta be able to let me know if this will work.

Also...

The 880 I have has a date stamp of '08.

Must have been a developer's or reviewers issue?

This kind of makes me believe even more my iMac will handle it.

Any info appreciated.

Alright!

The Core i7 880 works in the late 2009 iMac 27" Core i5 2.66ghz, flawlessly. Nothing needed to be updated or changed - just gutted my machine and pulled out the old i5-750, dropped in the i7-880 and went to town.

Geekbench score went from 6405 to 9500.
And that's only running 4gb of memory.

Should have 16gb of memory and an OCZ collosus here Thursday, and a Radeon 6970 2gb here by the end of next week.
Will update on those, if anyone is interested.

As long as the FSB on the Core 2 Duo is the same as your target upgrade LGA 775 (1066 mhz), and the TDP equals out, I don't see any reason why you can't upgrade it. That said, your criteria pretty much limiting you to a Core 2 Quad 9505s, and that's not going to get you anywhere great except in programs that really love lots of cores. Maybe useful for multitasking, but I wouldn't see many scenarios where the reward is proportional with the agony.

If you're thinking of completely replacing the board - that's pricey and massive surgery that I'd only undertake as hobby or for fun work. Doesn't at all seem worth the cost and effort involved, from a practicality point.

But from a purely and absolutely technical perspective:

I did some really extensive repairs on a 2009 3.06 C2D, it's actually sitting in my girlfriend's bedroom right now. It's the 21.5 inch model, but the insides were remarkably similar to my i5 (now i7) 27". Her integrated 9400m is soldered to the board - no graphic upgrade possibility whatsoever.

But since you have the dedicated 4670, if you wanted you could likely move up (provided you follow the other discussion's basic layout.)

My graphics upgrade went swimmingly, plug and play. 2gb of VRAM on my 6970, Core i7 880 at 3.06 ghz, and 16gb of 1333mhz RAM. Pretty much as maxed out as I'm going to get the thing, but it's bought itself another 2 years on my desktop and then many more after that as my girlfriend's/family's machine.

My iMac late 2009 is running fine on Mountain Lion with the 880 upgrade.

What it may have been for your CPU 2600-2700 upgrade is beyond me, as Apple usually uses generic chipsets that as long as TDP and socket requirements are met, it runs.

I'll do a little more research and get back with you, if nothing else it's just a matter of modification of the KEXT file to show your 2700 as supported. Or maybe Apple specially wrote drivers in ML to take advantage of Airplay in Mountain Lion for only the 2600. If so we just need to spoof your iMac model I'd to make it think you're a 2009, and airplay will just not even try.

But no, my 880 is running ML like it should, no errors or anything beyond a certain heat increase and slightly dirty electricity output from the USB ports (only really apparent if you're doing audio work with USB powered toys).