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The insides of the Intel Core Duo iMac!
Tuesday, January 31, 2006 / Disassemblies
Twice as fast as the old iMac? Intel chips inside? With this kind of hype buzzing around, we had to take a look inside one to see what all the fuss is about. As usual, the inner workings of the iMac are as unique as the external case. Let’s take a look…
Here's the back side...
Like most things Apple, there is a marked disparity between the external simplicity and internal complexity of the iMac. Who would guess there’s a number-crunching Intel beast living inside this humble design?
We'll start by taking some trim off...
The take-apart remains fairly simple for the iMac. No iMacs were harmed in this production.
The logic board is looking quite organized these days...
The iMac logic board uses space efficiently — it has to! Here you can see the secondary board on which the processor and cooling system are attached.
Underneath the fancy H.R. Gigeresque cooling apparatus lurks a processing beast
Straight out of a sci-fi novel, the scream’n Intel Core Duo is chilling out underneath a sophisticated cooling system. What’s underneath that chunk of metal?
No Intel logo, but the writing's on the chip!
Well here’s what all the fuss is about. The Intel Core Duo processor. Does this look sorta familiar? That’s right, it’s a ZIF socket just like the original tray-loaders back in the day! Could it be? A return to processor upgradable iMacs? Let’s dig a little deeper.
And looky here! We can take it off.
The chip comes out of the socket easily enough. Make way for the third-party upgraders! We’ll be back with more information and photos of this exciting piece of hardware soon!
December 1st, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Can you tell me more about the hard drive? I need to replace mine but looks like you have to remove the ‘green’ card and replace, correct? Yes, I am a novice, but still want to do this operation.
December 6th, 2009 at 4:12 am
Ok I have a Core Duo iMac that cooked the video card (128mb version 20in screen) and since the video is not replacable I was wondering if the CPU pin out is the same as it would be in a windoze box for that chip. Um… L775? I think? I happen to have a cruddy windoze machine I am thinking of hackintoshing just to see if I can. If only Apple made a box that users could replace parts in that didn’t cost $2500… sigh.