Swap 2013 iMac screen with 2015 iMac screen - and internal SSD speed difference.

[Pnemesis86]

Hi there,

I’ve got a lot out of support from the Mac Rumor forums in the past but this topic was one I wasn’t able to get a clear answer on. So I thought I might share in case it helps anyone else.

I picked up a late 2015 iMac (1080p non-retina i5-5575R @ 2.80GHz) cheap as the display glass had cracked and the screen had been taped onto the aluminium chassis. My hope was to swap the screen out with the one which was flawless on my late 2013 iMac (1080p i5 4570S @ 2.9GHz).

I had seen online that several replacement screens available to purchase were compatible for the 2012, 2013 and 2015(non-retina) iMacs - not 2014 for some reason - so I thought that it was reasonable to assume I could swap my two around. But I could not find anything about swapping displays between these iMac models.

So I bought the replacement adhesive strips and got to work removing the screens. Thankfully the cracked screen didn’t totally fall apart when I removed the tape and most of the damage was contained to near the border.

I worked out that I needed to swap the internal LCD display cable (LVDS cable) as the connector on the late 2013 iMac logic board was a different width (and possibly different number of pins? I didn’t count) to the connector on the late 2015 iMac. Thankfully the connector on the LCD panel itself was the same.

I plugged in the swapped LCD display cable and LCD power cable and they both booted and worked perfectly. So yes, I was able to swap out the damaged screen on my late 2015 (non-retina) iMac with my late 2013 iMac.

Lastly, while I had the screen off I took the opportunity to internally install the SATA SSD that I had been running the late 2013 iMac from via a USB 3 enclosure. I was interested to find out what speed difference (if any) there would be having the SSD inside the machine and whether it would be worth the hassle of removing the screen to install a SATA SSD internally instead of externally. The speed comparison was something I wasn’t easily able to find information on online either.

Using Blackmagic design’s Disk speed test I got the following values.

Original HGST 1TB SATA HDD 5400RPM - Internal

Samsung 128Gb SATA (6.0GHz) SSD - External via USB 3

Samsung 128Gb SATA (6.0GHz) SSD - Internal

So you can see the SSD has a substantial speed increase from the spinning hard drive whether internally or externally connected. There is a slight increase in speed by connecting the SSD internally but only in my case by a small percentage - +3% write and +7% read.

I hope the above will be useful for others.
Thanks.

 

[TwoH]

Nice repair and upgrade.

Yeah all non-retina 1080p LCDs are compatible with each other - this includes the 2014.

Only reason places might not say it is compatible is due to the positioning of the backlight cable and LVDS. Both of which can either be swapped out or bent into proper place.