Chosen Solution
I have an old 2009 iMac 3.06 GHz that started to show signs of dying. The GPU is toast, it’s running slow (already installed 8GB of RAM) and runs hot. Since the GPU is toast, turning it on would require 9 restarts before the LCD would come to life, and despite having lots of free space and just a few startup apps, it’s slow as mud. My dad wanted to ditch the old iMac and buy a new one (hopefully not the Pro), however I wanted to give a shot at making it run as new. Here are a few things I wanted to upgrade on the Mac: Better CPU (most favorable)Radeon 6xxx swapSSD (as boot drive)RAM (just a refresh with new 2 GB x 4 sticks) I wonder if it’s possible to do any of the upgrades? I have seen a few CPU upgrades but most were done on a 3.33 GHz Core 2 Duo version, and the Radeon swap was done on the Core i-series.
You have a Core 2 Duo model so your options are more limited. You can upgrade to the 3.33 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU but thats not much of an improvement. I would pass on doing that. As to replacing the GPU card: Yes that would resolve the GPU failure. I would go with the Radeon HD 4850 with 512 MB. As for the SSD yes that can give your system a lot of zip but you would then either need to buy a fairly large drive to get the deeper storage, or you’ll sendup giving up your optical drive for the second drive. Instead I would go with a hybrid SSHD drive. Because of your systems limited SATA ports I/O speed SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) I would recommend going with the Seagate FireCuda. It offers a SSD cache to improve its speed and yet it offers the deeper storage of a traditional HDD. I would go with at least 8 GB of total RAM. Your system can support unto 16 GB of RAM. I would also recommend going with MacOS Sierra (10.12.x).
