Can you install any A1286 logic board in 15" Unibody?

"Brad S

@samusaran


Rep: 403




4


2


1"

"A real answer.

820-2915 2011 is what you have. This is 2011. This board is ok besides the GPU. It will fail every 2 to 3 years, and only get worse as time goes on. The boards available have already been used for 2-3 years, and the replacement chips are harder to find new, so more people will be advertising ""repairs"" for this board that don't actually work more than 2 months, because they are not using new chips. This board is bad.

820-2850 2010 will fit, but only if you get the older battery. You can just chop up the connector and splice the wires from your battery onto the connector of an older battery, but this is a pain in the @%^. 820-2850 also have rampant kernel panics due to issues with VRAM pgood signals and other that is too much to mention here. Short story before dan calls my sentence noise, 820-2850 is junk to be avoided at all costs. This board is WORSE!

820-3330 2012 will fit but require you mess with the LVDS cable to get it into the connector, which is slightly different. This board is much better. You get a cooler running processor, a cooler running, MUCH MORE durable GPU that will NEVER die on its own, and no stupid random issues. This is also an upgrade in processing power, GPU power, and battery life because this is a more efficient processor. Your present battery will fit this just fine. You may have to replace the LVDS cable for it to fit if you can't jimmy it in there. 99% certain this will have to be replaced.

Any other boards like 820-2330, 820-2523, 820-2532, will not physically fit the machine. Also, these boards do not use the same connectors for wifi, bluetooth, webcam, hard drive, etc - it will all be a mess and not fit at all.

These are the ONLY differences in terms of how it connects and fits into your machine. Make your choice wisely!

P.S.

99% chance Apple is full of $@$* on the logic board issue, I would try booting with a different drive and see if it does the same thing. Apple rarely does real diagnostics in store, just tries to get you to agree to the highest tier of service and politely tell you to F off or buy a new laptop."

"Yesterday I swapped MBP early 2011 logic board to mid 2012 2.3 Ghz board. I had the same problem with LVDS cable as casagrande2407 mentioned. 2012 board was already with heatsink preinstalled (the seller told that it is a brand new logic board ). I watched several videos on MBP 2012 teardown and noticed that there is no heatsinks on Platform Controller Hub and Thunderbolt port controller, so I decided not to install heatsinks from dead board. While I'm writing this the hottest part of the board is CPU and its temp. differs from 33 C to 40 C.

My MBP was lying on shelf for 2 years and now its alive! I'm really glad!"

"Thanks a lot Brad for the very useful info. I had the same early 2011 logic board that suffered from the well known GPU problem. Based on your postings I decided to replace it with a mid 2012 2.6 GHz logic board. The whole operation took me about 2 hours. The most difficult part for me was to connect the LVDS cable, the connector on the mid 2012 board seems a bit smaller.

The board that I received was just the board with all the chips on it but no provisions for cooling of the chips. It was quite easy to transfer the heat pipe of the old board, but nothing was foreseen to cool the Thunderbolt controller and the Intel BD82HM65 Platform Controller Hub (I looked that one up ;-), also no screw holes present. I took both the covers from the old board and 'glued' them on the cooling past on both controller chips. Of course this is a very imperfect temporary solution which is holding now for a week. I'm not sure what the final solution looks like for this. The screw holes mounted on the old board can only be taken off by using a lot of violence - I'm not sure if I will succeed without ruining them. But further I see no room on the mid 2012 board to put the screw holes as there are electronic components scattered around at the spots where the screw holes should be positioned. Even with non-conductive superglue I doubt it is a good idea to fit them on the new board. So I am very curious Brad how you managed to do that!

Either way I am very happy with my 'new' MBP."

Thank you Brad, I have change my early logic 2011 board with a mid 2012 and it works fine. it was pretty stressful and it took all my Sunday to do that. My advices: take the right screwdriver, a magnifying glass. It is not necessary to remove the battery. I am french and i bought my board in US.