HN crowd is treating this as some sort of sorcery.
Meanwhile it's just everyday business in China. People send their laptops or graphic cards with soldered RAM and get the device back with double RAM/vRAM. "Brother Zhang" is one of those who operate such a shop: https://youtu.be/TcRGBeOENLg
Had such services been more available in the US, I would not have needed to sell a laptop that had 8GM RAM and could no longer handle my workflows but was perfect otherwise.
HN crowd is treating this as some sort of sorcery, you can do it at home with a $60 hot air station.
The only thing approaching "secret sauce" is the BIOS modding, which varies in difficulty depending on the device. For many devices it's just a case of reconfiguring strap resistors.
I have watched more than a few videos where someone tries to upgrade soldered RAM at home, only ending up sending the laptop to the same repair shop they hoped to skip after a failed experiment.
Unless you can put money on your words and provide some sort of guarantee, nobody is going to take that.
If the untrained "you"'s failure rate is above about 25% with the failure result being a merely inoperable but repairable card, it's not an acceptable outcome for most people, who quite reasonably see it as an unacceptable risk.
In practice, it's more like a 75-90% failure rate if you're unfamiliar with ball-soldering techniques, which most are since it's been considered impractical to do soldering in the US since the through-hole days, and so there's not a professional tradesman class to teach kids. What does exist of soldering is stuck in the far past from an electronics manufacturing perspective.
Yeah a $60 hot air station may be enough, assuming you have all the consumables and chips.
This isn't something even the average techie will risk trying.
My 2008 MBP had a motherboard failure due to bad factory solder, but you could sometimes fix it by taking the motherboard out and putting it in the oven for just the right amount of time to reflow it. I still remember how scary it was putting the logic board in the oven - but it wasn't really bravery, when the alternative was a non-functional laptop anyway. I did eventually give up on it after it had relapsed two or three times.
My MBP had the same issue and was eligible for a replacement but since the computer couldn’t boot due to a GPU issue they couldn’t run the GPU test to verify it was a GPU issue. Even though you could clearly read the logs and tell it was the GPU.
So good, did this 3 times, everytime it would fail faster haha. Another trick was to run a benchmark, disable sleep and wrap it in some blankets until for an hour or so until the gpu solder was reflowed, didnt try that haha
Sounds about right for success odds for a novice, definitely don't start out on an expensive card. Get some low-capacity DIMMs or obsolete GPUs to practice on.
No, he's right. Techies are cowards. Those poor but educated people in the slums of Shenzhen are reverse engineering Nvidia GPUs to find out how to add more RAM, so what the fuck are we doing to have less results?
Yep. We've broken lots of things. Expensive things. Some days, when I remember the (frequently dumb) things I did as a youngster, I am surprised that I still have all 10 fingers and both eyes.
Yeah, it's gonna be more than that. You'll also need a hot plate, flux, solder wick. I'd double that price to 120, not to mention it takes quite a bit of practice to learn bga soldering.
this bios modding, you just get a boar supported by coreboot or something similar if you want to make it easier. if you like to tinker its an option to avoid certain things. uefi firmware can be pain to extract and unpack i think and often its signed. u need to modify the firmware because anything after is already loaded into ram and from there u can not reinitialize ram controller
I wonder whether (without soldering) replaceable GDDR RAM on graphics cards would really result in such a large speed penalty. System memory often isn't soldered to the main board either, and this doesn't seem to have large performance penalties.
The RAM in your desktop could run at much higher frequencies if it were soldered. The RAM the M5 Macbooks use runs at 9600 mbps. The base spec for DDR5 is 4800, and I rarely see people running at much higher than 6000. There's probably someone who's gotten a 9600 mbps overclock running on their desktop, but it's unatainable for a normal consumer outside of machines with soldered RAM.
Because GPUs have had it soldered since the beginning, while desktops have had it slotted since (close to) the beginning. There are some exceptions to that rule, but it mostly holds.
Not to mention that the bar of acceptibility is moving. We had RAM in slots in laptops for a long while, but it's (not so) slowly going away. You can still find laptops with SO-DIMMs, but it's not a given anymore.
Perhaps it impacts size, manufacturing (automation) and money considerations. I mean now you suddenly need a slot of golden plated pins, you suddenly need a module with said pins and a memory chip soldered. You're introducing so much steps and complexity (thus expense) there for net negative.
I know that people like to argue "but I can't upgrade RAM". Yes. But as we see here not impossible. Your car also needs some effort to change some parts and perhaps even more effort compared to resoldering some chips at a shop that knows how-to.
> Perhaps it impacts size, manufacturing (automation) and money considerations. I mean now you suddenly need a slot of golden plated pins, you suddenly need a module with said pins and a memory chip soldered. You're introducing so much steps and complexity (thus expense) there for net negative.
How is this relevant when the same point applies to system RAM?
Desktop DDR rarely exceedes 64bits(you have to combine more than one dimm). Since RAM is a parallel bus that means 64 conductors that have to be impedance and length controlled. GPUs use >192bit busses, with 512bit in the high performance GPUs. So that's now 512 conductors.
512 conductors that have to be exactly the same length. Make them longer you'll say- now you just lost your high memory clocks to propigation delay and parasitics.
"Please note: All Upgrades have been put on hold due to the double cost of Memory Modules. The option to upgrade the supported GPUs has been disabled on the booking page."
They're 2080 Supers, not 2080 Tis. And apparently, RAM upgrades just aren't cheap/easy/possible ATM either way. But if those RAM upgrades were a thing, then I think these cards might max out at 16GB instead of 22GB, as that represents a natural doubling.
For what they are, as they stand: You'd be safer and better-protected to buy one from eBay for ~$200 USD than to get one from some rando on the internet, like me.
what he's trying to say, it makes no sense to pay him above market rate for those cards to justify him bothering to send you one when you can buy cheaper on ebay with more guarantees and protections.
I recognized the name of the company from the YouTube videos they have posted. It is likely a legitimate business, but as they are in a region I am not in, I can't speak to their actual performance or reliability. Here is their YouTube page:
This seems to be a company in the UAE. I've noticed in general that the far (and middle) East have far more miscellaneous repair services companies than the West, and also more information online about it (albeit not in English.)
Yeah. Even a smaller town will have a random repair shop where a guy will replace phone screens, solder in a replacement power supply, and he seemingly has some kind of connection that can get him all these parts from Shenzhen. A comparable sized town in America won't have anything comparable other than a Dollar General selling phone chargers.
A modern cellphones have only about 10 replaceable assemblies[1] - repairers aren't typically replacing individual broken chips, an entire assembly/part. "[knowing] what you're looking for" is easy of you know what broke the device, or following basic troubleshooting steps.
Getting into repairs these days is easy; YouTube, Alibaba, Forums/File-sharing sites, USB-C and Open Source firmware-flashing tools have conspired to lower the bar of entry. If you have an old phone in your device drawer with a damaged screen or unusable battery, you probably can fix it yourself, with the right tools and some patience.
Well and also parts are far more available and way cheaper. Had to replace 2 capacitors and a thermistor in an power supply not long ago. Cheapest price I could find for those 3 parts? $40. The highest unit price of those components individually was like $1.25, but I didn't need 20+ of each and everywhere else had crazy shipping costs on top of 20x markup. And there was no place within 300 miles that sold anything like that if I didn't want to wait 2 weeks for it to arrive.
A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away. The chat, diagnosing, and repair took me less than an hour overall so with cheap parts I could have charged someone $40 and made $35 an hour if I had cheap and available parts while saving them $250. But dealing with parts issues nearly triples my minimum price for a business operation because I either have to spend a bunch of time finding the best deal for parts and have this thing sit on my bench for two weeks+ as they ship, or get ripped off paying 80 dollars to get it within a week. And by time they are spending $120 on a repair, they are already nearly half the price of buying something brand new that can be shipped to their door in 2 days with a 2 year manufacturers warranty, so they wouldn't want to attempt to pay someone to repair it at all.
> A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away.
Or from a previous customer who had to replace a whole power supply module, and those parts happened to be perfectly fine on the otherwise broken subassembly they left behind for disposal.
That's how repair efficiency enabled by scale looks like when you zoom in. They'll replace your broken screen in 5 minutes and for 10x less than the price of the replacement screen (!), as long as you let them take the damaged one, because someone will actually fix that damaged part and use it as replacement for the next customer, etc. There is enough volume they can decouple and time-shift actual repair and replacement.
(And of course should they not have a freshly repaired part of a kind, there's probably a booth selling those very parts within 50 meters of where they sit, that's also a direct line to some factory in Shenzhen. You know, the kind of booth where they look at you funny if your answer to "how many pieces" has less than three zeros in it.)
I think it's a bit less about being extremely skillful and more about the number of people who go into hardware combined with the cost of living and renting office space.
There are a far larger number of people capable of re-soldering RAM on a GPU than there are high-paid professionals so it's not exactly a labour shortage problem.
You shouldn't have to live in a shed in order to run a small business and we know something about our present situation is anomalous because small businesses like this were much more prevalent within living memory and currently exist in other countries.
A comparable town in the US would absolutely have a local or franchise repair business doing those things. What neither of them will have in abundance are shops replacing BGA modules as an upgrade. For that it'd be major cities only.
At least in Australia, anything outside common phone repairs goes in to the "not worth it" basket. I had a USB-C port snap of a microphone, PCB pads were still fine, just needs someone to use a hot air gun to attach a new port. Repair stores didn't want to touch it.
And I can see the logic. Wages are so high that anything that they can't exactly know the repair time and success rate can easily exceed the device value. While in lower income countries they can afford to mess around for quite a while on repairs since the replacement cost is relatively massive.
I had my lenovo laptop's last USB-C port bugger up. of course, lenovo themselves will repair this by replacing the mainboard (~1.5k+?).
so I did a search for anyone doing microsolder repairs nearby, picked the closest, and found someone who diagnosed, quoted, and then replaced both ports, and a chip that had vaporised itself along the way, for a couple hundred AUD.
I don't entirely understand why they "didn't want to touch it"? Surely they were capable of soldering a new port. I'm sure they'd have had to charge a lot. There's unlikely to be much difference in cost between the repair and a replacement microphone.
But why not offer that? All else being equal I'd rather fix something than put it in landfill and buy a new one. Am I the only one?
Tbh they didn’t even open it up. Just decided it was too hard and gave it back. I had to follow a YouTube tutorial to work out how to open it since stuff is designed to hide all visible entry points these days.
Had I handed it to them disassembled and asked them to just solder a port on they might have accepted.
Liability, and hassle. They have a few repairs they do regularly. Anything else is a risk and they don't need the money that badly. And they can't be 90% confident they'll get it right, since they don't do it regularly.
Replacing components like a phone screen, yeah - but not the kind of thing the OP is talking about.
More like replacing a worn USB-C port on a random motherboard using a soldering iron, hot air station, and microscope, or tracking down an unknown failed component on a circuit board, or swapping a random surface-mount Motorola chip in the ECU of your early-2000s car. Sometimes there’s a whole market square where every shop specializes in one of these things.
After getting sucked into "I bought this to repair it" YouTube I started looking for things on eBay. I was amazed to find that things like PlayStations with declared faults which made them completely unusable were selling at 70-80% the price as things which were sold as working.
The only thing I can imagine is that there is an underground repair business buying broken items to repair them and resell them that was efficient enough to keep the margin between non-working and working that low.
The price of repair is calculated into the asking price.
If it is obvious that it only needs an HDMI port then the listing will cost what a regular PlayStation will cost minus HDMI repair and minus ~15% for risk. So about 70% of a regular PlayStation.
Buying for repair only makes sense if you buy undiagnosed in bulk for 30% of the value after repair. You can then also scavenge some for repairs of others.
I don’t think that is true. Ubiquitous access to free or low cost education is what makes this possible, and I certainly don’t see those kinds of businesses in towns of 50-100k people in the USA. There are people that are capable of that kind of work, of course, but they are employed by x corp or do contract work, and they are not competing with the cost of replacement consumers devices, since their rates would have to be > 150 an hour to stay in business.
As far as I can tell, it's mostly just cost of labour vs cost of buying a new device.
Watching professional repair shop youtube channels is one way to get a feel for the economics of it - it's usually only worth their time if it's a quick fix on an expensive product or a complex data-recovery attempt where the customer is paying much more than the cost of the device itself, because they value the data on it.
What if we automated it? Obviously, fully bespoke diagnosis and repair can't be automated (that's what bespoke means), but surely we can have a flying-probe machine that you put a MacBook circuit board into and it runs down the common failure tree by detecting the circuit board model and testing voltages at different points?
They have devices pretty close to that, in China. Not fully automated diagnosis, but test jigs that hook up the things that need hooking up, and monitor the things that need monitoring. Search "iPhone test fixture" on aliexpress.
This used to be a common thing even in Portugal, until we started going down the throw away working electronics mindset, and yes we're to blame as well, consumers drive the market.
Damn I have one of these and it is still good shit. It's the best one I think, the Asus ROG OC edition sitting in a razer core x external GPU. I want this but does it make sense? I'm guessing it doesn't make sense as I'd have to send it there.
I'd prefer some instructions on how to do this myself.
Honestly, I have a 2080ti that I use to play and I can tell you the math isn't there to upgrade it. It's much easier to just find a 3090/4090/5090 and keep pace with the software and hardware simultaneously.
I have a 3090Ti, And it is still plenty performant for all the stuff I do. Especially considering modern pricing, I don't see me swapping for anything newer for a long time to come.
In Japan, these 22GB 2080 Tis have been showing up on flea-market apps for months now, and I suspect many of them may be coming from China. I’ve been wondering whether buyers realize they’re modified cards, not factory models.
Hopping on VastAI or Runpod (GPU renting websites) it is easy to spot a bunch of these cards. In terms of AI performance though it doesn't seem to be that good.
When I was a kid software that would "double your RAM" was a thing. I remember thinking it was awesome, and at the same time feeling a huge sense of doubt that you could do that.
Definitely not. DOS had disk compression utilities, but not RAM - there was no reasonable way to accomplish that at the time.
You may be thinking of "memory manager" utilities like QEMM and EMM386 which tried to maximize the amount of conventional memory available to programs (i.e. below the 640KB boundary). These programs worked primarily by causing drivers and TSRs to run in upper memory - they didn't actually provide more memory.
Oh right! I got disk compression and QEMM and EMM386 all mixed together in my now decades old memory (pun kind of intended) of DOS to produce that false recollection.
AI has kinda already gone through that phase, with quantisation you can effectively double your ram with almost no negative effects by going from fp16 to int8.
I’m surprised the concept of drivespace/double space died off. Maybe most files self-compress well from their native app, but I’m sure it’s not universal. OSs don’t seem to offer a prompt to compress relatively unused files and transparently uncompressed them on-demand.
It looks like for a while this was a way to work around the US tech bans in China. And cards with this mod pre-applied seem to be on ebay for about $500, which is cheaper than used 3090s from what I can see.
Sometimes this happens when someone uses a webshop platform to sell something with an unsteady or unknown price - it's $0 to put in the order (the webshop does not make you pay before forwarding you to the next step) and then you talk to a human about your requirements and price.
A 2080Ti is approximately on a level with a 5060Ti (from a quick search), though obvs does not support the newer DLSS features etc. So to get a good upgrade you’re looking at a 5070 or better.
If this gives you a performance boost for less $$$ …
Meanwhile it's just everyday business in China. People send their laptops or graphic cards with soldered RAM and get the device back with double RAM/vRAM. "Brother Zhang" is one of those who operate such a shop: https://youtu.be/TcRGBeOENLg
Had such services been more available in the US, I would not have needed to sell a laptop that had 8GM RAM and could no longer handle my workflows but was perfect otherwise.