[fg137]

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.

[Retr0id]

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.

[fg137]

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.

[Retr0id]

The point is you can do it yourself, you don't need anyone else's guarantee.

[GauntletWizard]

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.

Tl;dr: https://xkcd.com/2501/

[filcuk]

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.

[Retr0id]

The average techie is a coward.

[m12k]

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.

[wil421]

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.

[thenthenthen]

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

[Tade0]

I've known about this trick earlier, but the people who do it caution that the chance of succeeding is like 50/50.

[Retr0id]

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.

[Tade0]

I think I'll stick to my area of expertise - replacing "non-replaceable" batteries. Amazing ROI using a $14 soldering iron.

[tuyiown]

> coward

This can be a result of unexpected and costly if not worse, surprises.

[Zambyte]

More expensive than the alternative of buying another laptop? That seems like roughly the worst case anyways. Might as well try.

[inigyou]

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?

[thenthenthen]

…well put, and their tools are basically beetlenut and long finger nails

[greenavocado]

> so what the fuck are we doing in our cushy lives?

Racking in money printed out of thin air by banks using a sleight of hand then forcing people to give us things in exchange for said printed money under threat of being bombed, invaded, and sanctioned

[Tangurena2]

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.

[Retr0id]

No pain, no gain.

[gkhartman]

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.

[mrheosuper]

You can definitely do it by yourself(after all, the tech worker is just a person like us). But it will definitely cost more than $60.

Hot air station, stencil, stencil frame. preheater, etc. Even board view sometime need to be purchased.

[saidnooneever]

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

[cubefox]

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.

[Telaneo]

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.

[cubefox]

This doesn't explain why non-soldered RAM isn't okay for graphics cards when it is still considered perfectly acceptable for desktop computers.

[Telaneo]

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.

[Nursie]

A longer time ago, sound cards used to have expandable RAM too.

Go back far enough (486) and cache was off-chip on simms too!

[inigyou]

Yep. Soldered is just the best manufacturing process (besides on-package). Moving things close together simply delivers better outcomes and that will always trump openness concerns.

[gosub100]

Because you can't sell more graphics cards if consumers get more use out of them.

[jve]

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.

[cubefox]

> 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?

[butvacuum]

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.

Seeing the problem?