Upgrading the memory in a computer is usually a straightforward case of swapping out a few DIMMs or SODIMMs, with the most complex task being to identify the correct type of memory from the many available. But sometimes a laptop manufacturer can be particularly annoying, and restrict upgradability by soldering the RAM chips directly to the board. Upgrading memory should then be impossible, but this reckons without the skills of [Greg Davill], who worked through the process on his Dell XPS13.
The write-up is a fascinating primer on how DRAM identification works, which for removable DIMMs is handled by an onboard FLASH chip containing the details of the chips on board. A soldered-on laptop has none of these, so instead it employs a series of resistors whose combination tells the BIOS what memory to expect. Some research revealed their configuration, at which point the correct chips were sourced. Surprisingly it’s not as easy as one might expect to buy small quantities of some RAM chips, but he was eventually able to find some via AliExpress. An aside is how he checked the chips he received for fakes, including the useful tip of hiring a dentist to take an x-ray.
The final step is the non-trivial task of reballing and reworking the new BGAs onto the board, before testing the laptop and finding the process to be a success. We’ll leave you with his final words though: “But next time I think I’ll just buy the 16GB variant upfront.“.
We’ve seen quite a lot of [Greg]’s work here at Hackaday, one of his most recent was this amazing LED D20.
“I bought a BGA re-balling kit”. Who knew? Fascinating read and excellent pics which just leaves me feeling old and outdated! Back to my through hole resistors…
Oh, you’d know if you’ve looked into how to fix game console hardware issues.
You’re not lying. I remember doing this to Xbox 360’s all the time.
> restrict upgradability by soldering the RAM chips directly to the board
The data rates are getting so high that soldered on to the board provides the most reliable and is the cheapest option. The alternative would be to add a 204 pin gold contact SO-DIMM edge connector coated with a thick enough layer of gold plating to last at least the specified minimum 25 mating cycles. That probably adds 5 to 10 bucks to the BOM and it is a through hole part that needs to be hand soldered in place which will probably add another 1 to 2 bucks to the final price. The socket will also uses up a lot of area on the PCB compared to a BGA which adds to the end cost, and requires more traces on the board than a BGA would require. The gold contacts on the SO-DIMM plug needs be thick enough to also last at least the specified 25 mating cycles, and SO-DIMM modules have additional chips to deal with the problems from the edge connector so are not as cheap as a BGA which is additional an cost.
DDR SDRAM modules ; LP-DDR SDRAM modulesDDR5 288 pins desktop ; LP-DDR5 262 pins notebook
DDR4 260 pins desktop ; LP-DDR4 260 pins notebook
DDR3 240 pins desktop ; LP-DDR3 204 pins notebook
DDR2 200 pins desktop ; LP-DDR2 200 pins notebook
DDR1 184 pins desktop ; LP-DDR1 144 pins notebook
For LP-DDR3 you are probably talking about a 96 ball TFBGA, which will be less traces on the PCB.
A technically inclined person would pay a bit more and pick devices with replaceable batteries, and upgradable RAM and try and squeeze a few more years out of a product. But the bulk of people will just look at the price and pick the cheapest thing that meets their needs for now. They will bin it in 2-3 years (hopefully in e-waste) and buy something new that is shiny.
Looking at the image above it is BGA has 178 balls which should be less traces required than the 204 for a DDR4 SO-DIMM. But the take away should be the same adding a socket adds cost.
The sad truth is that most people are scared to open devices with a screwdriver let alone upgrade any parts.
DDR4LP-DDR3Thanks for this – I hadn’t realized the cost impact would be so severe. I put 2 weekend’s research into finding a laptop that could support up to 128GB RAM (found one, but what a nightmare).
I tend to keep laptops for 6-8 years and a lot of folks were doing the same before soldered RAM.
We must not forget that the present strategy generates far more e-waste than would otherwise be.
Holding onto that notion, if we want to bend the waste curve downwards then there’s only two “other” choices: legislative carrots, or sticks (OK there’s a third choice: the status quo, pretending there is no choice… and/or getting angry at the messenger ).
I would be surprised if people threw away laptops because of soldered RAM. How many people (average ones, not enthusiast types) actually took the opportunity to add RAM regularly?
It definitely limits the scope for reuse though. While I fall into the enthusiast bracket I’ve picked up a few aged laptops, stuck in an SSD, upgraded the RAM and passed them on to non enthusiast users.
They don’t directly, but as an IT engineer, I frequently get requests and queries about performance of 8 yr old machines for which the only resource limits are storage and RAM performance. With Wi-Fi antennae coming in at close 3rd (a lot of basic devices skimp out on a 1×1 antenna).
Me on every desktop and laptop I’ve had since the 90’s. I’m in my 40’s now and have upgraded my ps2-ps4 hard drives all the way to graphic cards in pcs.
What did you find that can be specced with 128 GB? My IT department managed to give me a Thinkpad with 64 GB eventually but it’s a Xeon processor, cost many pounds and weighs about the same as my car.
It looks like there are some that are incrementally less chunky(eg. the Dell Precision 7560 is a bit lighter than Lenovo’s P17); but I doubt you’ll find anything notably cheaper or lighter; with the possible exception of a couple of ‘gamer’ models(cheaper, not actually lighter, the Asus G703GI-E5148T is 4.7Kg; but you may pay Nvidia less of a premium for a gamer-drivers GTX rather than a Quadro).
Now that 4x SODIMMs allows for 128GB of RAM, 2x allows for 64GB, which really cuts into the audience for the 4x units; and means that it is almost entirely people who are looking for screaming power across the board.
If I may ask, which laptop did you find that supports 128GiB of RAM?
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 for example.
MSI Titan GT77 12UX, specifically the TITANGT7712063 model
So how do we get from here to a more technically inclined population that will pay a few bucks extra for upgradability?
Sure let’s all buy a bunch of extra connectors we don’t need and have our laptops weigh more, perform worse, and have less rigidity, just to placate the people who don’t know how to plan ahead.
When you’re on a small budget, buying a system with 8 gb of memory knowing you can spend $100 upgrading it to 32 or 64 later IS planning ahead. Next question.
You are “only” one order of magnitude wrong about the cost of sodimm connector, congratulations!
Spoilers: they are <$1.
I checked on digikey and mouser where you know you will get ones that are actually to spec. What brand are the <1$ ones ? What does their datasheet say about them ?
The brand you get soldered at the factories in mainland and Taiwan.
Another spoiler: Foxconn doesnt order Foxconn connectors from digikey.
Also, driving all that extra metal of the connectors and traces slows down data rates.
Is this why this soldered ram is clocked at exactly same speeds as normal SODIMMs in other laptops?
Even Apple with their M1 Package on Package ram doesnt clock it faster than ordinary dimm modules.
Soldered ram is only done to reduce cost and make the product thinner. it is not done for performance.
And to help enabling nicer configurypricing for the manufacturer. $200 for $50 part is really nice deal! And too bad if higher ram amounts are bundled only with the most expensive CPUs…
fool
true
I used to work at a place where we remanufactured off-road electronics (think of parts for million dollar tractors) and setting up to remove and re-install BGA chips was … a challenge. An expensive challenge at about $75K, and hiring someone from Kansas City onto staff to help iron out the process.
And then John Deer comes along and sues you for trying to fix the tractor yourself.
Not everyone requires $xxK X-Ray Inspection Machine.
I have been trying to figure out how to pull this off on my laptop (Lenovo) but I knew that the strapping resistors would be the problem and after a few weeks without my laptop and no schematics available, I ceded defeat and put it back together.
I think it may be time to give it another go.
Mostly, I am just ticked off that there isnt a simple sodimm slot in this thing. It would be added BOM cost, but there is definitely room for it. I even had to solder in my own M.2 socket to install an nvme drive because it was just… not installed on my model of laptop!
Why don’t you just buy the right laptop in the first place? If you need to upgrade, why not sell the old one and buy a new one? If you are going to expend resources to upgrade, then really upgrade, get a faster CPU and the right drive from the get-go. Enjoy your nifty new machine.
Why did Mallory try to climb Mt. Everest? “Because it’s there.”
Good grief what a misplaced effort, might as well dig holes in your back yard and fill them up again. Surely there are more productive uses for your talents.
Well, I know people who run for hours, just for ending at the same place. Not to talk about people who gets paid for running after a ball…
Yeah in a couple of years the sad is to small and MS decides to inflict windows 11 on you. And after retiring a high end laptop is not so affordable. Fortunately my laptop has the ability to add a memory dimm and replace the ssd which I have done twice
That assumes the right one is available in the country you live in. My Lenovo was only available with 8 gig, of RAM in the US. In other countries, you could get it with 16 gig.
Often laptops are only purchasable with a certain amount configurable, but have hardware support for amounts of RAM that aren’t actually available at the time. See: gaming laptops that came out around when a new RAM standard was introduced, ditto business laptops. DDR4 started out with 4-slot laptops only being purchasable with up to 64GB because 32GB sticks weren’t a thing.
It’s fun to apply the parts yourself.
where do folks get these schematics and board layouts for commercial devices? Is there some seedy underbelly to hardware hacking I’m not privy to?
The answer to this question is irrelevant, take the author’s advice, don’t go there.
Hackaday might be the wrong place for your “advice” haha.
It’s not my advice, it’s the author of the article telling you to skip this stuff and buy the right laptop in the first place.
Holly f*** this place has changed.
The ones I’ve seen are usually stamped with confidential all over them. In my experience they are uploaded to corners of the web, usually accessible by Google and found by searching the right number stamped on the board or some IC. My old stock car stereo had some great documentation on a Russian website from a Chinese partner to the oem. I found some good stuff on my samsung wireless subwoffer just last night.
I’m at the level where I’d need a laptop that uses socketed DIPs.
You’re living in the past, Apple has shown us that the only way forward is integrated SoC with RAM on the chip, everything else will be left in the dust, as expensive slow dinosaurs.
Yup. we’re supposed to throw away hardware and buy brand new. Upgradability gets in the way of a sexy industrial design. Even my PC laptop (ASUS ROG G15) did this in the weirdest possible way. It has half the memory on-board and half on an SO-DIMM. if you upgrade the memory it can’t run dual-channel and makes it slower. (*facepalm*)
Why do you have to upgrade? Sell it to someone else and buy the right laptop. This is weird. Do you also expect to be able to upgrade your other appliances? Do you upgrade the motor in your dishwasher? Do you upgrade the compressor in your refrigerator?
Does new dishes require upgrade of the dishwasher? Do ny refrigerator needs new and better compressor every few years to run? You clearly miss the point or just trolling
I’ve replaced all of these at various times. but I don’t buy the comparison because I can put any food I make myself into my refrigerator without getting Apple’s permission.
tbh “X” seems to be on a mission of some kind. Like telling others what to do with their time, shoveling $$$ to corporations instead of servicing the stuff that still works for you and other fun stuff. I hope the dollars will always be with him!
Seems like a genuinely good guy :D
I don’t care what you think and I assume the reverse. You can take my advice or not, it’s up to you.
Yeah I’m in favor of reducing consumption and recycling, selling your old laptop burns a lot less carbon than shipping a package of ram chips around the world. Better yet donate your old laptop to a low income student so they can share in your wealth.
You should read the article again and pay particular attention to the very end.
Wouldn’t buying a RAM SO-DIMM with the correct memory chips be easier than going the aliexpress route?
Laptop ram is totally different from dimm ram. Laptop ram is word sized because often there are only one or two chips. On dimms you have lots of chips so each chip is only one or two bits wide. Also laptop ram is unbuffered while dimms are buffered so you can plug in a bunch of them on the same bus.
Did you perhaps think about server ram when writing this? Most desktop ram is very much Unbuffered. You can even buy sodimm-dimm adapters and happily use laptop ram on desktop.
Do people out there live in an alternative universe where you can’t sell a used laptop? If you’re outgrown your computer I’m sure you can find someone out there who can make use of it as it is. Selling a used laptop is the best way to recycle it, with zero effort someone gets a “new” computer and you can get the one you really wanted in the first place. Hint: buy a laptop with good resale value.
Dude, what is your agenda here? You have felt the need to reply to ever single comment with basically the same snarky comment about just selling a laptop and buying another. Have you seen the used laptop marketplace? You aren’t going to get much for a used laptop, so yeah, you might as well try to upgrade it yourself seeing as how THIS IS HACKADAY. Your advice would be great for Wired or Gizmodo or Tom’s, where kids have infinite money and buy a new laptop every month, but we like to push out limits and the limits of our hardware and try new things. It’s pretty much what we do here.
Well he clearly knows everything about everything
Don’t mind me, just brushing the dust off fossils, increasingly confused about the evolution.
I stare at a world where your pragmatic sentiment is evacuating the public forums and giving way to the Dunning-Kruger affected, en masse. After all, who has the time anymore to idle on their less accessible tech, the same tech that costs an increasing amount of time to afford?
Expandable hardware configurations; what once was a race to exploit practical designs for superior performance, has become the captivity of hope in the unveiling of obsolescence as a function of time and money. From forcibly reentering hardware into requirement zones, a love story of tech and those who dare to seek the knowledge required to obtain dominion over what they already own, to that is now a eulogy of an era that succumbs to the siren’s song; “do not learn, seek no understanding. You’re an end user and that’s it. Accept the system that was designed for you and accept that our profits are more important than your digital freedom, allowing you to access what you own. If we remove your ability to reach, you’ll forget what it felt like to even touch the apple.”
It’s sad that we once had the power to invoke the sun upon the wings of overzealous manufacturers, even bankrupting companies with the dispersal of secret wisdom and circuit board Konami codes, infinite lives from the fountain of lifetime warranties. Glory was exalted upon those who found their handles stickied upon every modding forum as if becoming the very virtues of what we should all strive to be. To hack is to free the power from the clutches of those who hide it from us. It’s not about monetary value, it’s about what is fair, it’s about what is ours.
Hack – the – planet.
“Have you seen the used laptop marketplace? You aren’t going to get much for a used laptop,”
Easy workaround: sell yours, but also buy another second-hand notebook.
The last time I soldered RAM was increasing the RAM from an adequate 256kb to a blazing 512kb on my Toshiba laptop around 1986/6
A decade later, I took ram off a scrap motherboard and used it to replace 4x256kb ram on some SIMMs. Went fine, except the Mac Plus wouldn’t refresh it, so when it idled, it woukd crash when I moved the mouse. That’s when I read that ram couldn’t be properly refreshed in that Mac.
I have a shoebox of RAM, when I started accumulating it, there was a future, at least for what I was doing. But now I’m not likely to bring home things that use SIMMs or ealy DIMMs.
I guess at that time it was through-hole with 2,5mm pitch though, so a lot easier :)
Can we please go back to the days of easily replaceable batteries, replaceable/upgradable RAM, and replaceable/upgradable storage? I don’t mind if it’s not super thin and sexy, I want something I can hold on to for some time and that can upgrade and repair as needed.
I’ve been given laptops from other people that I managed to save from the trash and make usable by simply adding another stick of RAM and replacing the HDD with an SSD.
Why did he have to reball the chips? Did he buy used RAM?
@Tom Hargrave said: “Why did he have to reball the chips? Did he buy used RAM?”
Yup, most likely DRAM that has been desoldered/salvaged from broken laptops or mobos, It’s even more common with CPUs. In the likes of China, India, and Pakistan E-waste is valuable, everything worth anything gets recycled. Slave labor is dirt cheap. I’ve heard of horror shops where kids pass PCBs through vats of hot used cooking oil, then the boards are hit with a stick and the unsoldered parts fall off into a basket, ball-less of course. After being washed and bagged the used parts are sold online. At some point in the chain the valuable parts are tested in a ZIF jig. The parts get reballed and soldered into “new” products. You can buy solder ball masks for less than a buck online. The solder balls are quite cheap as well. The masks and balls floating around online are there more for soldering old parts onto new boards, not so much for repairing old boards.
Brand new chips do not come pre-balled.
This motherboard doesn’t like it has a conformal coating though. AFAIK Apple’s do.. It will make the whole process a lot harder (again). So don’t try this at home :)
You really think/believe Apple conformal coats anything? :—D They dont even do it to their watches.
Neither is this laptop pcb covered in anything other than oxidation and dirt.
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Interesting re. resistor straps. Wonder if thats what they used on my laptop?
Its unlikely as this one uses actual socketed RAM but it also has soldered on, which limits me to 8GB (4s+4) so there’s no guarantee that it will work at all with a larger module.
Supposedly there’s a hack where you can disable the onboard RAM entirely via strapping so the laptop uses the faster external module.
This is a year late but anyway @X – don’t forget people who refer to hackaday come from all over the world not just 1st-world countries. In my country the f*cking corrupt customs makes new laptops super expensive such that the store price of new laptops is 2x what I see on Amazon! Plus old laptops keep their value for a loooong time, even now a 2nd-hand T480 ain’t selling for less than 500 USD here. So it makes economic sense in my country to really really maximize old laptops as much as possible. Same with cars. A 2005 Corolla ain’t going below 2000 USD!! While in US car forums nobody will buy it for 500 dollars!
I mean, any halfway reliable running and driving car is worth at least $1500 here in Texas. You really won’t find much below $1000 without serious mechanical problems. Someone bought our 2007 Altima with a partially disassembled engine for $650-700, and that was in 2020.
I definitely take your point about the cost of new items though, and I acknowledge I’m lucky that many things (imported commodities) are cheaper here than elsewhere. We also pay far too much for other things (services), but that’s a whole other issue. I try to keep my stuff as long as possible also. Didn’t upgrade my Q9550 until 2020 and this Ryzen 3600 should last another ten years.
Indeed. I agree with you completely. We get to make do with what is available and which may not be what you would have wanted but that has become a matter of the available becoming desirable. In my own country, buying from Amazon attracts custom dues of nearly the same amount of the laptop, apart from shipping that would cost an extra one fourth or more, and all of this at an exchange rate nearly twice what is the international rate (due to the existence of a more functional parallel foreign exchange market). So, I would rather explore ways to maximise the design of whatever laptop I could get my hands on from what is available.
I really want to know if there are alternatives that involve setting up a virtual RAM by using a portion of the onboard SSD, for example or using a RAM option that works via the thunderbolt port.
lame
I know I am very late to the discussion but I am hoping that there will be a solution for me. I arrived at this article form searching for solutions for my Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 370, on how to upgrade the RAM. The RAM therein is 8 GB, which was the only available model at the time after I had been robbed of my Dell and I needed a replacement so I could continue my learning. I had hoped for a 16GB RAM minimum but it was not forthcoming and I had thought that the yoga would have an upgradeable RAM like I found on a number YouTube videos I had watched for reviews. Unfortunately, mine came soldered.
I really want to know if there are alternatives that involve setting up a virtual RAM by using a portion of the onboard SSD, for example or using a RAM option that works via the thunderbolt port.
Thank you in advance.
I assume by “virtual ram by using a portion of SSD” you are referring to swap, I know windows and Linux let you use swap, and if you aren’t already using Linux and it fits your workload, you can certainly switch to something like Linux Mint for lower ram usage by the OS and should improve performance across the board
Hi Guys, does anyone know if there is a way to upgrade the Razer blade 14 16 gb soldered ram to 32 gb?