Chosen Solution
Have a customer with a bad logic board in a MBP 13” i5 2.3 GHz. Running extremely slow (probable bad sensor chips on board. Even an SSD with clean system did not help nor a new HD/IR cable nor exchanging the RAM. Will this machine take a 2012 i7 2.9 GHz logic board? Usually i would answer this myself but been up since 2:30 AM with pain and just not thinking well right now. Will I have to stay with a 2011 board and will a late 2011 board work? @danj
From what research on compatibility I did, it looks like it will work, but you probably also want the newer WiFi card to get BT 4.0 out of the system. There isn’t anything specific on chassis catches, so you may want to check the board layout yourself against a 2012 board to confirm all of the holes line up 100%. It looks like the card iFixit sells is the BT4 one for both machines. You will also need to replace the heatsink as the 2011 one won’t carry over to the 2012 board. Build this into your estimate at a averaged price since it may not be as cheap as you want it to be. When I got mine (Late ‘11 with livable cosmetic issues at a discount), I was told that there is no real performance gains with the 2012 i5, so you probably want an i7 board to make the bump meaningful - unless the client just wants native Mojave/Catalina support. In addition to that, I looked at the boards for the 2012 and 2011 and the holes match up.
