Thrifty modder salvages laptop RAM for custom desktop DIMM

Hey. Psst. Listen here. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but RAM prices are pretty insane. It’s bad enough that people are desperate for ways to save a little money. Desperate enough, for example, to manually desolder memory chips from laptop RAM and resolder them onto a blank desktop RAM circuit board. This is exactly what a modder did.

According to VideoCardz.com, a PC user in Russia purchased much older, cheaper DDR4 RAM in laptop SO-DIMMs, carefully removed the individual memory chips by hand, then manually soldered them onto a pair of blank DDR5 DIMMs. With many, many (and a lotsoldering microchips is incredibly tedious) work and a bit of custom firmware loaded, the Frankenstein act was accomplished.

The “price” for a single assembled 32 GB DDR5 stick amounted to just over 17,000 rubles, or about 218 US dollars. According to the modder, that’s about a third of the current price of this hardware in Russia, and it looks like he has the tools and know-how to make multiple RAM sticks… if he can keep sourcing the chips. The modder, Viktor “Vik-on” Veklich, seems to know his stuff; it 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 a new memory. Users are searching for laptop memory-to-desktop adapter parts, now frequently out of stock on Amazon. This is older and slower DDR4 memory, but any memory port is 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 compatibility with DDR4 memory.