Is there ANY way to upgrade the CPU in a 2010 21.5 iMac?

Title says it all, would love the upgrade to a newer iMac with an i5 or i7 but I haven't enough money. I am taking a photography course at college and editing photos that are a high resolution on photoshop takes its toll on my iMac!

Can you do it?

teamtomo said:

Title says it all, would love the upgrade to a newer iMac with an i5 or i7 but I haven't enough money. I am taking a photography course at college and editing photos that are a high resolution on photoshop takes its toll on my iMac!

Can you do it?

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You might consider installing an SSD.

Razormac said:

You might consider installing an SSD.

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I thought you could only do that on 27inch models?

teamtomo said:

I thought you could only do that on 27inch models?

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SSDs are sold typically in 2.5" HDD form factors, so just about any machine can be upgraded to one, provided it uses a SATA bus connector (which yours does). If I'm not mistaken, all iMacs use 3.5" drives, so you'll need an adapter caddy, but it shouldn't be that big of a deal.

Now will faster I/O operations improve the performance of Photoshop while editing? Maybe, if you're digging heavily into VM, but I suspect more memory will be a far more effective upgrade.

CPUs are generally paired with a chipset, so even if the CPU is socketed (and I don't know off-hand that it is), your chipset (the supporting parts that are mounted to your system board and collectively make a series of circuits a computer) won't support it.

We have members who have upgraded older iMacs. Also, there is this.

OWC Upgrade Service For All Mid-2011 Apple iMacs Now Offers $249 Solid State Drive Option With Over 2x Faster Performance Than Factory SSD Options | Other World Computing Blog

I have already upgraded the RAM to 8GBs

It is possible to upgrade the chip, but it probably isn't your bottleneck. I've read of people putting a core 2 duo chip in an older core due machine and it worked, and that's a 64 bit vs. 32 bit update. How much use the motherboard makes of it I don't know.

Couple questions..

How large are the images you're working with (working size)?
How much free space do you have on your scratch disk?
How fast is your scratch disk?
How do you have PS configured to use RAM/scratch disk?

zacster said:

It is possible to upgrade the chip, but it probably isn't your bottleneck. I've read of people putting a core 2 duo chip in an older core due machine and it worked, and that's a 64 bit vs. 32 bit update. How much use the motherboard makes of it I don't know.

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Only certain Macs had a socket though. All the OLD style Intel Minis did but with the newer one, no more socket. I know most of the newer iMacs probably do not. I can find out for sure.

Google it, all the people I saw that tried this ultimately ended up with an unbootable machine.

Rob is right. It's a great way to turn your iMac into a doorstop. As dtravis7 stated, older machines used a ZIF socket, newer ones don't.