Hey. Psst. Listen here. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but RAM prices are kind of insane. Bad enough that people are getting desperate to find ways to save a little money. Desperate enough, for example, to manually de-solder the memory chips off of laptop RAM and re-solder them onto a blank desktop RAM circuit board. Which is exactly what one modder did.
According to VideoCardz.com, a penny-pinching PC user in Russia bought up much older, cheaper DDR4 RAM in laptop SO-DIMMs, painstakingly removed the individual memory chips by hand, and then manually soldered them in place on a pair of blank DDR5 DIMMs. With lots and lots (and lots, soldering microchips is incredibly fiddly) of work and a bit of custom firmware loaded, the Frankenstein deed was done.
The “price” for a single 32GB stick of assembled DDR5 came out to a bit more than 17,000 rubles or approximately $218 US dollars. That’s about a third the price of what that hardware currently goes for in Russia, according to the modder, and it looks like he has the tools and the know-how to make multiple sticks of RAM… if he can keep sourcing the chips. The modder, Viktor “Vik-on” Veklich, seems to know his business; he sells a series of RAM tester parts, most recently a DDR5 model.
This isn’t the only example of people getting creative — or desperate — to find new memory. Users are looking into laptop-memory-to-desktop adapter parts, now frequently sold out on Amazon. This is older, slower DDR4 memory, but any memory port in a storm. We’re also seeing more interest in new parts that use older, easier-to-find memory and processors, like brand new motherboards with AMD’s AM4 socket and DDR4 memory compatibility.