[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

[inigyou]

This is true. And sitting back and not working and just expecting the money to roll in.

[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