Hassam Nasir Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
Notton You left out the "BGA soldering station" and "steady hands" from the bill. Reply
Adrian the Alchemist My wife dropped her 3 year old laptop in October and Broke the screen and backlight. So opened up the laptop when repair cost was twice as much as new, 500 gig SSD was a nice take 1 screw out and retrieve But the 16GB laptop RAM was soldered in, WHY? I could have removed it and sold on or even donated it to someone if it was easily removable but not manufacturer made it nice and hard to do anything with it. So went off to electronics recycling and a £10 coupon from Currys Reply
Gururu There are a lot auctions in my area with old laptops carrying older style DDR4. Will any DDR4 work to get a modern DDR4 system off the gorund? Reply
thestryker Gururu said: There are a lot auctions in my area with old laptops carrying older style DDR4. Will any DDR4 work to get a modern DDR4 system off the gorund? Assuming the laptop is using SODIMMs instead of soldered all you should need is a SODIMM to DIMM adapter. Not necessarily a great long term solution, but a potentially workable one until memory prices become more sane. Reply
bit_user Adrian the Alchemist said: But the 16GB laptop RAM was soldered in, WHY? Probably it's LPDDR5. If so, you cannot put it on a DIMM, even if you wanted to. LPDDR5 uses tighter electrical specifications that are incompatible with DIMM or SODIMM, although they can be used with the more recent LPCAMM standard. So, to answer your question: soldering it provides power savings & reduces product cost. Also, can potentially reduce device thickness. Reply
Cluckern They have adapter cards that do this, but as someone who lives in the US, you can still buy a used 32GB kit of DDR5 for less than $200 all day long Reply
wwenze1 For most people it's economically smarter to just work at a day job. $130 saved? That's 6 hours of median salary in the US and 3-4 hours of average wage. Noting that aside from the time taken to actually set up the equipment, do the task, cleanup, and also to sourcing the parts, getting the parts… not to mention the complete lack of warranty Russia is just a strange case of highly-skilled people (e.g. console jailbreakers) being jobless or underemployed. Reply
toaste >At that point, one might even consider just using the SO-DIMM sticks as is with a desktop adapter that would add noticeable latency This is not true. The adapter is literally just wires. If it trains successfully, you're getting the exact same timings as it would have had in the laptop. A custom PCB allows you to write custom SPD values, but if you're prepared to cook up custom SPD JDEC and XMP timings, you're prepared to manually overclock your RAM. Reply
bit_user toaste said: >At that point, one might even consider just using the SO-DIMM sticks as is with a desktop adapter that would add noticeable latency This is not true. The adapter is literally just wires. If it trains successfully, you're getting the exact same timings as it would have had in the laptop. I agree that the adapter isn't adding latency via electronics nor distance, but I do think you'd tend to get worse timings with it. In a previous thread, someone posted a youtube link where the subject tried such an adapter and found it only succeeded with some of the DDR5 SODIMMs he tried, and only at a lower speed and I think at worse timings. I think the reason it would affect timings is just because it affects signal integrity. toaste said: A custom PCB allows you to write custom SPD values, But you don't get a large pool of chips that you get to sort, like the major DIMM do. So, your custom timings end up being only as good as the worst chip, and that might be pretty bad. Reply
thestryker bit_user said: I agree that the adapter isn't adding latency via electronics nor distance, but I do think you'd tend to get worse timings with it. In a previous thread, someone posted a youtube link where the subject tried such an adapter and found it only succeeded with some of the DDR5 SODIMMs he tried, and only at a lower speed and I think at worse timings. I think the reason it would affect timings is just because it affects signal integrity. It's largely fine, but the adapter type can influence things. Of course the other issue is that the SODIMMs which are reasonable to purchase will be JEDEC timing so there's no guarantee as to what tuning will be possible. Hardware Canucks tested several SODIMMs and adapters: 9n1iRDnD3HM View: https://youtu.be/9n1iRDnD3HM?si=YMV0HpgeGmDAM75s Reply
Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/modder-saves-usd130-by-building-32gb-ddr5-desktop-dimms-from-scavenged-laptop-memory-donor-modules-soldered-to-bare-pcb-flashed-with-custom-firmware-even-run-xmp#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.