ancientscream

my imac started having an issue about 6 months ago where it wouldn’t stay turned off, later it started having an issue...

I’m having the exact same issue on my mid 2011 imac 27”, it seems to be the end game issue for even well looked after iMacs of this age, I also had less of the issues on snow leopard but they still occurred, so i don’t think its a software issue I suspect its a power supply under load issue, getting brand new power supply’s is very hard except perhaps from China as most are just ripped from an equally old iMacs etc and the 310w apple specced supply has very little head room with age to keep the machine going, no bulging caps on mine either but meh. I’m going to run AHT, can I do that from optical media? Anyone know where I can download for the 27” mid 2011. I think i have the original optical media that came with the machine do they contain an AHT partition / disk? I don’t want to use the disks I had in it, as the random restarts manged to damage 3 drives and I dont want to harm them more, so I can’t use the recovery partition on my SSD for the moment I’ll have to try a sacrificial install on an older disk...

When you open it up you will find apple in the titanium laptops have used the worlds smallest internal cooling fan (1cm x 1cm of actual fan blade airflow area). Also pointing in a wierd relation to the vent it sits next to , the thermal design on this laptop could not have been much worse from a design perspective, except say a bare chip ? I have replaced the thermal paste on mine neatly and precisely with top quality thermal paste it makes very little difference, as the poverty of design revolves around an inability to push the hot air out of the laptop, again another example of form over function, this laptops micro fan will kick in hard with no heavy load straight after boot up. The only way to correct excessive fan noise on the titanium models would be to completely re-design them. They are flawed by design.

Apols this is not a solution jus wanted to agree with "Steven : Jan 30" I Totally agree with everything your saying about the way apple behaves with their product design choices and offerings those same flaws are all on my irritations list, now steve has passed perhaps we can rub some of this apple knows better than its customers … arrogance, re what they think we want from their products, out of apple, for every year they seem to engineer the products to their commercial benefit and not the customers, this trend seems unending and design is used as an excuse as to why.

Lightning connector runs at USB3 speeds yet ?!?!?! apple are such douches when to comes to USB speed increases

since you took off the heatsink a reapply with mx4 would be good in future, temps before temps after etc, evaluate factory tim performance ? but since no ivy and haswell factory IHS & Tim lga based issues, core temps should be within a 1-3degs of each other with direct heat sink to cpu die contact, and not varying by 10 degrees like on the lga version when OC'ed hard.

Ok so im taking it from the teardown, that on the non time capsule version they havent soldered the sata port and power onto the logic board ? so there is no DIY upgrading to a time capsule ? well at least its repairability index is way higher than most of apples other products, im taking from the photos and layout that the device vents in and out of the same thin bottom grey stand, and as usual with apple no foam filtering so the fan will clog up with dust, or sitting on medium pile carpets as that will smother the vents, is it noisy ? what diameter is the fan ? looks titchy and prone to low flow an noise ? 60mm ?