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).
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).