In this week's 'what the memory crisis is doing to people' news, a YouTuber has recently bought 32 GB of DDR5 laptop memory online and successfully converted it into memory for their desktop. Overall, it cost them just $175 ($120 for the memory and $55 for extra components). That's a bit of a bargain, as 32 GB DDR5 dual-channel memory is fetching upwards of $500 on Newegg right now.
Blighted Agent took to their YouTube channel to share the process, where they purchased two SO-DIMM sticks of 16 GB DDR5 memory on Facebook Marketplace (presumably salvaged from a dead laptop). From here, they put a stick on a preheater, then removed the BIOS chip, the SPD chip and all eight of its memory chips.
Buying new DDR5 DIMM PCBs and heatsinks off AliExpress, they cleaned the factory unleaded solder on the laptop memory, then soldered them onto the new PCBs. It's an impressive feat that requires reballing the memory chips with a stencil, a very precise procedure.
Blighted Agent says, "You want a thin layer of flux, not too much or not too little. If you do too little, the balls might not reflow properly. If you do too much, they might bridge and cause problems".
Effectively, those solder balls connect the memory chip circuitry to the circuitry on the board, so mistakes would require redoing the entire process. From here, everything that was taken off the original SO-DIMM sticks is then put onto the new boards, tested via the desktop BIOS, before getting a heatsink.
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