Steps 1–24: iMac Intel 27" Teardown
Step 9
Ever wonder what was behind that monolithic black display? Here you go: 27" of display-less iMac. (Actually, we're pretty sure the 27" measurement is completely meaningless now that the display is gone.)
Notice how the stand is pivoted fully upward. Without the added weight of the LCD panel, there's not nearly enough force against the spring maintain the normal neutral buoyancy.
The hard drive occupies the center of the unit, while the optical drive and fan are clearly visible on the right.
Step 10
Two T10 Torx screws hold the hard drive in place.
Once they're removed, the hard drive easily pivots up and out of the system.
The 27" iMac ships with a 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA hard drive (Apple offers an optional 2TB drive for an additional $250).
There isn't really room in here for a second drive, but you could certainly swap this one out yourself. You could hypothetically install an SSD, but this seems like such a good a media computer that it would be a shame to limit it to current SSD capacities.
Step 11
Disconnecting antennas and removing the AirPort Card.
A single T6 Torx screw secures the standard PCI-e wireless board to the custom board it's mounted on.
Even after removing the silver EMI shield, it's challenging to read the main Wi-fi chip. It's an Atheros AR9280.
The two identical chips near the antenna connectors are SiGe Semiconductor 2593A20 power amplifiers.
Step 12
A few screws later, and....
The power supply is out.
Oooh, pretty colors!
Both the blue and red parts are capacitors. Unfortunately they didn't have enough markings on them for us to identify their capacitance.
The power supply puts out 25.8 amps at 12 volts, for a total output of 310 watts. That's the biggest power supply we've seen in an iMac.
Step 13
The Bluetooth board is in the corner of the computer, grounded to the case. We began the removal procedure by disconnecting the blue antenna cable.
The board is one of the few components held in place by a T8 (as opposed to T10) Torx screw.
Step 14
This may be the most underwhelming component in this iMac, the 8x SuperDrive.
The fact that there is no Blu-ray drive in here is a bag of hurt.
C'mon Apple, iMacs in 2005 had 8x SuperDrives. The SuperDrive just doesn't seem so super anymore.
The good news is, it's a standard 12.7 mm, slimline SATA optical drive. The drive Apple should have included is this Panasonic UJ-135 Blu-ray drive.
Apple lacks software support for playing copy-protected Blu-ray movies, so if you install a Blu-ray drive, you'll have to boot into Windows to enjoy the show.
Step 15
Apple made good use of the extra available space to include large, quiet fans with lots of low speed blades.
Step 16
Removing the massive logic board requires two hands.
Notice how far apart the GPU and CPU are, and how they have separate heat sinks leading to opposite sides of the computer. This rather complex thermal engineering work allowed Apple to upgrade the iMac to use Intel's desktop processors.
With a bit of work, that would make a great desktop image
Hey, I am still a Big Mac!!! Don´t mess with me. My brother mini, doesn´t have a display and no body cares ;P
Thatd be great to have a High-resolution full-on photo of the internal at the resolution of the new 27" iMac for a background wall paper.
it would look so b@d@ss to have that as a desktop wallpaper sort of like an XRay image
I'm quite irritated with Apple for not providing a slot for a second 3.5" drive. They're the masters of Tight Squeezes; they clearly could have shuffled things around slightly more to add a second drive bay.
A gorgeous media computer like this simply craves twin terabyte drives running in RAID.
So how many fans does this iMac have? The final image with the parts arranged neatly looks like it has three.
iFixit Staff
Yes, there's three fans total. One for the CPU, one for hard drive, and one near the optical drive.
I second that! That would be an awesome screen background.
DO YOU ALSO SELL THE 2 GB PC3-8500 RAM CHIPS
You say that there isn't room for another drive; does that also go for 2.5" SSDs? Are there extra SATA ports on the logic board for more than the single drive anyway?
iFixit Staff
You could fairly easily replace the optical drive with a 2.5" hard drive or SSD. We sell an enclosure that enables you to install a SATA drive instead of the optical drive. There are no extra available internal ports that we noticed.
If i install a SSD instead of the optical drive, could i boot up OSX from the SSD and use the internal 3,5 HDD for media Stuff?
iFixit Staff
That should work just fine. You would just select the SSD in Startup Disk as soon as you get the drive in there with OS X installed.
What model WD 1TB is this one? the Caviar Black or the RE4 model?
There should be a 3.5" drive with both an SSD and a high capacity HDD on it (dual SATA). The SSD wouldn't need to be that big, say 32 or 64GB , since the most active files and swap space would reside there. I guess it would only apply to the iMac though.
Given how much the SSD in my MBP has sped things up, I almost feel installing an SSD in a new iMac is a necessity.
You would have to downgrade the internal Hard Disk to less than the size of the optical bay HD or use the optical bay HD as the boot drive for Time Machine backups.
The Time Machine backup disk must always be larger than the disk it backs up from, AFAIR.
Nope, you can choose what you backup, and if it fits, it'll do it.
Which 1TB hard drive is used - is it the Hitachi?
And I wonder which drive they've chosen for the 2TB option?
You can maybe use SATA port multiplier and, from photos, I would say that there is enough space for 2,5" SSD behind GPU heat-pipes ? right ? (although maybe it is not best idea to put SSD close to heatpipes :D)
iFixit Staff
It's a Caviar Black, model WD1001FALS.
I'd like to try the following:
SATA 1: 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD
SATA 2-> port multiplier
1: 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD
2: SATA to eSATA and thread out cable from iMAC
Then put the SSDs in software RAID 0 and still have a nice eSATA port coming out...
Of course this would require the SATA controller to support port multipliers, any idea what chipset it is??
Hi Luke,
To confirm, this enclosure is compatible with the latest Quad-Core i7 27" iMac, correct? Also, do you know of any external enclosures where I could use the superdrive once removed? Or can you recommend an external DVD burner to purchase as a replacement once the internal one has been replaced by an SSD drive?
HI, is there any heating sensor will have to be disabled, if I replace the optial drive with SSD. I notice someone replace the HDD with SSD, then the heating sys reports error and the fans go nuts. So how about optial drive, the same?
The tech specs for the 27" iMac say it can be up to 365W, so I suspect the Quad Core variant has an even larger power supply.
iFixit Staff
I think Apple may be talking input power, while we're talking output. An input of 365 watts and output of 310 watts is 85% efficiency, which is typical for a good power supply.
And I learn something new from this site yet again. :)
Whatinhell is the second board by the PS? It's definitely something not seen before.
iFixit Staff
I believe that's the backlight board for the display.
Are there any slot loading blu-ray drives we can replace this with?
iFixit Staff
Yup, the Panasonic UJ-135-A will work just fine.
Can this trik be done also on a iMac 24" - 2007 (2.4GHz) ?
Blu-ray display 1080p. What is the experience indeed of watching a movie with that black bar tags? And wait I am not considering here in "FullScreen" Youtube, mobile DTV, iTunes Movies and DVD "Super" Drive. All of that might seems very "distorted" by the 2560x1440 resolution. The ATI will have to work a lot to upscale all of this.
A stand alone Blu-ray might be in the works, similar to the external usb/firewire devices for the MacBook Air.
Built in, they really are a "bag of hurt", as Steve pointed out.
What about putting a SSD drive in here instead
The web site says 12.7 mm while the original drive says 12.5 mm. Small difference, but could be a problem closing the case or aligning the disc in the slot.
I think they were just a bit lazy with the measurements here.. look at the image of the superdrive and google the code. I'm pretty sure that it is actualy a 12.7, not .5 (i've NEVER seen a 12.5 drive.. anywhere), so it will be a perfect fit.
I recommend the UJ-235A over the 135 they mention in the article too, as it can burn blu-ray discs at 4x.
iFixit Staff
iTems, you're right, that's a typo. It is indeed a 12.7mm drive, so there's no difference between the SuperDrive and Panasonic's slim Blu-ray drives. If you want to burn Blu-ray (and have a bigger budget), the UJ-235 drive should work fine as well.
imacs in 2003 had superdrives too!
Is it possible to put a 1TB WD laptop hard drive here instead? I would think you would need some sort of mounting apparatus.