"how's ram shortage going"

this is trending on aliexpress

@whitequark laptop ram do be short tho

@RedstoneLP2 @whitequark about 50% shorter than desktop ram ;p

@whitequark I'm not much of a hardware person. Is that a converter board from one type to another?

@mer yes. normally you never see them used

@whitequark Hm, what's a virtual patent?

@turi polyfuse maybe?

@whitequark used laptops being plundered for RAM and the rest is trash now I guess :/

@elexia I don't know whether that is happening, vs. just adapting otherwise not very useful laptop RAM stocks

@whitequark heard from some folks that it's getting pretty common to see laptops without RAM cause the RAM costs more than the rest of the laptop.

@elexia huh. welp. grim

@whitequark using these would be the only way to get my desktop's RAM situation even more cursed than it already is

@jn @RedstoneLP2 @whitequark But using these adapters makes it tall! So tall it won't fit in some positions in some configurations.

@ozzelot @RedstoneLP2 @whitequark finally, highmem

@jn @ozzelot @RedstoneLP2 incredible

@whitequark is laptop RAM really so much less expensive to grant this? 😲

@sverx the board is like $5

@whitequark
#alt4you
Three RAM adapter thingies for the corresponding DDR3, 4 and 5 sodim modules to their dim counterparts.

@glowl added, ty

@whitequark What's old is new again:

Back when I built my Pentium-1 I carried over several MiB of RAM on SIMM modules to those new-fangled DIMM slots using a pair of SIMM→DIMM adapters:

@datenwolf amazing, i haven't seen those before! (i am just old enough to have touched SIMMs irl)

@whitequark The fact this goes all the way down to DDR3 makes me think that these actually far predate the RAM shortage, but point made nonetheless, lol.

@whitequark makes me think again of selling my laptops ram after i finish uni in the next months, now that its so expensive it could pay my rent for over a month.

@zimward surreal

@whitequark I'm kinda surprised this even works, I thought the length of traces and such matters quite a lot with DRAM

@eloy it does but only within the same byte group, between byte groups the difference could be large and compensating for it is a big part of DDR training

@whitequark Just today I was saying that I have a lot of SO-DIMM RAM, but need proper DIMMs

@whitequark How about the other way around? Don't tell me it won't fit in my lappy, that's defeatist! 🤪

@whitequark I can imagine. Its interesting to know they exist

@mer @whitequark computer hardware markets only do this when they're in extreme distress

@JamesWidman @mer @whitequark @patterfloof Memories of 72pin SIMM boards with 4x 30 pin sockets on them... and if you had 2 slots, you needed to remember to order a left hand and a right hand one...

@chloeraccoon @JamesWidman @mer @whitequark quick, to The Leftorium!

@whitequark Yeah, I have one of those

@whitequark

@whitequark I see. For some reasons I had assumed the laptop RAM prices were surging too... 🤔

@whitequark I'm not against this at all. It's a nice way to recycle your existing laptop RAM.

@patterfloof @JamesWidman @mer @whitequark Okily Dokily!

@ozzelot @jn @whitequark i've had that issue with "normal" ram in desktop configurations already

@whitequark Oh fuck, I need that for my 128 GiB of DDR3 that I would love to move to a 5800X3D ...

@whitequark @elexia suddenly buying a laptop with soldered ram is both great and awful (great if buying second hand now)

@M0YNG @whitequark yeah

@whitequark I wonder if all this stupidity will end up raising the prices of the laptop renting contracts most IT companies have with OEMs… interesting times awaits us, if it does. 😝

@whitequark The IT scalpers near here have started selling laptops with no RAM...

@whitequark @datenwolf

Once I have had removed all 640kb of RAM off a PC XT clone to check any issues, and re-seated them. Looked very much like this (image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/h8t32l/8088_motherboard_from_ibm_xt/)

@M0KHR @datenwolf yepyep, I think the earliest physical x86 hardware I've personally operated was a sub-ATX 386 and a few 486's besides that. fun toys

@whitequark ah, right, thanks!

@whitequark EDO-RAM to DDR5 adapter when? 👉🏻👈🏻🥺

@whitequark the first one says "Abapter"

@datenwolf

When I built my first own PC (with a 386SX16 cpu I believe), it was the time when the first time an epoxy factory burned down and RAM prices shoot up.

I only could source SIPP modules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPP_memory) for a reasonable price. Thankfully they basically were SIMM modules with pins soldered on the pads, so I could desolder the pins and then use them as SIMM.

But boy was I sweating while desoldering due to the risk of destroying them.

@whitequark

@whitequark

Life is gonna get real interesting when the AI boom collapses

@whitequark I have been meaning to grab a few to see how much worse would it be to run SODIMMs over an adapter as opposed to directly for any decent DDR4 IC that I am familiar with given a decent motherboard and memory controller

@whitequark is laptop ram cheaper?

They are, too. It's just that if there's a 6€ difference in price it's worth it to do this.

@poggers.website @whitequark sure, I see the point...

@whitequark

Just so everybody fixes in their mind, what all of this crazy is for

https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkxs6xufAqYQuUAsVULEBWHJFdmtnXgahZc

@whitequark signel integritty is my pashion

@whitequark Scavenging old computers to make current ones work ... Cyber Punk is not dead.

@nela I would be quite curious about the results! especially if you can measure SI somehow

@eloy @whitequark you likely will experience issues on higher speeds, but overall there's no reason why it wouldn't work.

In current shortage people don't care about XMP since they need *any* ram

@RedstoneLP2 @jn @whitequark I recently found an sff thinkcentre in front of an e-waste bin, no ram of course, ddr4 is gold these days so it's possible it was kept by the previous owner. i had some laptop ram to spare, so i did purchase these adapters. i can only use one slot, the other module would not fit due to the presence of the drive cage (and even the one i can use is sort of rubbing against the fan shroud, but it works, so whatever.)

@mer @whitequark I have this suspicion that the normal use case is to be able to interface the SO-DIMM to a DIMM socket on a RAM tester

@datenwolf @whitequark I remember this thing in particular and how shock/vibration sensitive it made the PC

@whitequark I have done some quite cursed things to DDR3 SODIMMs in the past. I feel like DDR4 is a much better candidate for SI testing as it is much more on the unstable side, it is less temperature sensitive than DDR5 and it comes with much more mature PHYs and memory controllers than DDR5. the more interesting measurements are gonna be what ODT it trains best at and just how much worse it clocks (and to some degree how much worse it times). I have quite a shoestring budget with this so I will see what I can arrange but don't expect anything too fancy x_x

@datenwolf oh these fucken things...
*shakes fist in the direction of the past*
@whitequark

@thejessiekirk @whitequark

https://notalwaysright.com/laptop-flop-part-44/405289/

@M0YNG @whitequark @elexia this one weird phenomenon means second-hand MacBooks have stayed basically the same price this whole time

@whitequark @M0KHR @datenwolf i learned C on a 33 MHz amd386 with 4 MB of SIMM RAM and i think a 128 MB HDD running dos 5 and win 3.1.

This was circa 1999, so w9x was out, but we kept this box until around 2001 when we got an 800ish MHz pentium 3 running windows mistake edition (very shortly upgraded to XP).

@noisytoot @whitequark that's an adapter you use to get enough ram to run SAP

@azonenberg @whitequark @M0KHR @datenwolf thank you all for making me feel insanely old. I'm pretty sure I threw a hip out thinking about how my first PC was... literally a 5150 PC. Cassette port and all. Eventually with an expansion chassis and a couple 10MB HD.

Now to go back to figuring out where that 256GB of RAM disappeared to.

@azonenberg @whitequark @M0KHR @datenwolf The nineties were such an exciting time if you were into computing. Every time a computer magazine dropped in your mailbox, clock speeds had gone up again. (I learned C on an x86 with 640k RAM and a 30MB HD.)

@tom_verbeure @whitequark @M0KHR @datenwolf It's funny how everyone else who grew up in the same time period has all these formative memories of playing games on 95/98 etc and I never had that.

I was doodling in 16-bit PBRUSH.EXE and writing C in EDIT.COM

@noisytoot @whitequark they left that to prove it was written by a human

@datenwolf @whitequark Somewhere around here I have some 30-pin to 72-pin FPM adapters as historical curiosities.

@azonenberg @whitequark @M0KHR @datenwolf I don’t think anything will ever match the hype when Doom was first released. There must semiconductor companies out there whose entire existence is due to the spike in demand for network cards.

@tom_verbeure @azonenberg @whitequark @M0KHR

"3com" maybe? You know, the NIC manufacturer who cheaped out on MAC address allocations and reused MAC addresses for cards sold in different geographical regions.

@datenwolf @tom_verbeure @azonenberg @M0KHR that must be standard practice now, isn't it? does anybody promise globally unique hwaddrs?

@whitequark

Yep, they work as long as you have the space for the adapters.

@whitequark

@SeaDonut this is not real tho

@whitequark im using one of those right now lol, im lucky i happened to have a 16gb sodimm stick lying around

@whitequark EVEN FOR DDR3???

@whitequark

I got a wee bit of DDR3 laptop RAM
- a bit of DDR4 laptop RAM
- some old RAM 386s, ealy Pentium systems
- several old hard drives (working)

None of it is for sale. Gonna be my backup system.

@whitequark @catsalad

This ram shortage adaptor shit is getting way out of hand...

#Aislop #Ramshortage

@whitequark I need to grab a few of those

@whitequark was gonna post this cus it came on my feed too but i fucking knew i wasn't the only one... Thanks ali....

@n_dimension @whitequark @catsalad ew ai

@spycrab @whitequark @catsalad

No, you are wrong, I actually spent three days inking a sketch for an offside lame mildly amusing comment that everyone would ignore 🙄

But I was mindful of folks like you; you get to feel righteous, superior, totally miss the lame joke and broadcast to everyone you are one of the cool kids and I'm an evil broligarch fan person!
💀

You are welcome!

@n_dimension @whitequark @catsalad good job making ai slop for the situation caused by ai slop

@a1ba @catsalad @whitequark

#meta win

@n_dimension @catsalad @whitequark #there #is #no #point #in #speaking #hashtags #btw

@n_dimension @whitequark @catsalad ew, dog shit take

@spycrab @n_dimension @catsalad oh it's a vibecoder dipshit

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @whitequark wtf is an "activist investor"?

@north @whitequark

It is a term that emerged. I wanna say a couple of decades ago and usually meant an investor that use their ownership in accompanying to force specific business decisions.

So, in this case, the investor would be dictating to the company management to make an AI play or somehow sell itself to an AI company.

@whitequark does anyone have a hexcasting abacus to laptop ddr5 converter?

@whitequark Shame all my spare SoDimms are only 4GB.

That and I think the one system this might have been interesting to try in it wouldn't work due to clearance on the CPU cooler.