Just missed the TP forums and discussions.. been few years since my last TP went sticky kaput

[crashnburn]

Just missed the TP forums and discussions.. been few years since my last TP went sticky kaput.

Thought I'd say hello to y'all and chime in with the BEST COMMUNITY EVER

Hope everyone's well.

[axur-delmeria]

There's never a bad time to buy a used Thinkpad and once again become a bona fide member of this community.

[kfzhu1229]

There's never a bad time to buy a used Thinkpad and once again become a bona fide member of this community.

Well technically now is the bad time to buy an used ThinkPad (or any used laptop) if you want something that is capable of real daily driving (T61 or newer) as the Coronavirus pandemic has exhausted the second hand markets in many ways. I also made a hefty amount of profits for selling these older resurrected ThinkPads and Latitudes during the pandemic for this reason. Just look at how 4GB DDR2 sticks and X9000's went up in price for example.

[axur-delmeria]

Now that you mention it, I've noticed that 2nd hand Thinkpads are expensive right now. Just yesterday I found someone online selling an X220 around the same price I bought one five years ago (almost 300 USD).

[cadillacmike68]

I'm not sure about the RAM costs. I recently bought four 4GB DDR2 PC2-6400 for the same or less than what I paid a few years ago. Hynix modules.

[kfzhu1229]

I'm not sure about the RAM costs. I recently bought four 4GB DDR2 PC2-6400 for the same or less than what I paid a few years ago. Hynix modules.

Well the cheapest one I can find on eBay is like C$55 and that is only a one off deal. The rest of them are all question marks from China.
Compare that with the C$30 price tag I paid for the sticks about 6 months ago, there is just no comparison.
Getting fed up with the bad options on eBay, I am ordering straight from Taobao and lucky me that I know someone who's coming to Toronto despite the whole pandemic situation

[cadillacmike68]

I'm not sure about the RAM costs. I recently bought four 4GB DDR2 PC2-6400 for the same or less than what I paid a few years ago. Hynix modules.

Well the cheapest one I can find on eBay is like C$55 and that is only a one off deal. The rest of them are all question marks from China.
Compare that with the C$30 price tag I paid for the sticks about 6 months ago, there is just no comparison.
Getting fed up with the bad options on eBay, I am ordering straight from Taobao and lucky me that I know someone who's coming to Toronto despite the whole pandemic situation

The four modules I recently bought were from china. They arrived in about 2 weeks, and they work.

[kfzhu1229]

The four modules I recently bought were from china. They arrived in about 2 weeks, and they work.

Okay yeah at that point I will source straight from Taobao. it's cheaper, safer (if you order the listings by seller reputation) and arrives faster by 22 July because going to Canada is just that much slower in this Coronavirus pandemic. I have a tracked parcel from the US still not arriving here after a month!

[cadillacmike68]

OK, If alibaba and the 40 thieves can get it to you faster that's good. I haven't tried them before.

I've had decent luck with ebay, but I try to not order from china. That's not always possible, but I have only had one or two sipping issues. I've actually had more shipping issues from the US than chine, but buy about 20-50x more domestically.

I've actually has more issues with amazon than with ebay over the years.

Canada to US and the other way around are slower now. Not much either of us can do about that right now.

[RealBlackStuff]

The main bottleneck is Chicago airport, where staff has been reduced to less than 30% due to Covid-19.
They must have a new mountain range in their USPS-sorting Dept.

[kfzhu1229]

I know this is going off topic but I would like to update that it seems like those sticks in China are selling out extremely fast right now.
I was having my eyes on some nice heatsinked Kingston 4G DDR2 sticks and they sold out in a matter of days. Now I am just lucky enough to buy out the last of the Hynix and Elpida sticks at ￥200 and now all that remains out of these good sellers are in the price range of ￥250!
X9000/X9100 are also receiving the same demand on Taobao.

[cadillacmike68]

Yeah, they seem to be going fast.

Seems no one in the US has any for sale - probably because all the US buyers bought them to upgrade their machines and not to sell.

[RealBlackStuff]

I'm still sitting on a load of 512MB, 1GB and 2GB DDR2 sticks.
But I have only one 4GB DDR2-5300 and one 4GB DDR2-6400.

[cadillacmike68]

My 10 4GB DDR2s are all in use but I have nearly 30 1GB / 2GB modules. About half are in use in the T61s that are not in active use.

[atagunov]

When looking for RAM I got impression 1Gb/2Gb DDR2 sticks are rather plentiful in the market place..

[kfzhu1229]

When looking for RAM I got impression 1Gb/2Gb DDR2 sticks are rather plentiful in the market place..

Yeah because they are lot more mass produced and that they don't fail nearly as often. 16 high density chips means more heat and more chances of failure. I remembered when I was buying 4GB DDR2 sticks in person to a local shop, that seller had half a dozen of these marked as bad before finally digging out one that is good.

[zoltan87]

Yeah because they are lot more mass produced and that they don't fail nearly as often. 16 high density chips means more heat and more chances of failure.

I can confirm this, I have noticed that the 4 Gb sticks made the palmrest and touchpad area on my T601 Frankenpad a lot warmer compared to when it had only 2 x 2Gb sticks. I might even change back to having less RAM, as my use scenario is not memory hungry anyway.

It's a shame there is no way to somehow undervolt the RAM like you can do with the CPU. It would help a lot with temps.

[RealBlackStuff]

You can get cooling fins for those RAM modules...
If you put in PC2-6400, they run cooler than PC2-5300.

[axur-delmeria]

It's a shame there is no way to somehow undervolt the RAM like you can do with the CPU. It would help a lot with temps.

You also run the risk of making it unstable.

With regards to memory undervolting, I only know of one case: in a Thinkpad X220, where DDR3L (1.35v) ran at the regular DDR3 voltage of 1.5v, apparently caused it to run hot and cause intermittent RAM errors. So the owner modified the system board to reduce the RAM voltage to 1.45V-- though it was still higher than the proper DDR3L voltage, the RAM errors disappeared.

[kfzhu1229]

You can get cooling fins for those RAM modules...
If you put in PC2-6400, they run cooler than PC2-5300.

I'm already planning to get two dozens of them off taobao because of the 4gb ddr2 sticks and Latitude c840 overheating the ram sticks

[zoltan87]

You can get cooling fins for those RAM modules...
If you put in PC2-6400, they run cooler than PC2-5300.

Yes the modules I have are PC2-6400, at least they were advertised and labelled like that. Granted they came from China...so who knows.
I haven't opened up the palmrest recently, but I remember the space is VERY tight there for the RAM. What kind of heatsink could fit there?
EDIT:
I just did a quick search, and I see the heatsinks you were referring to. They are completely flat, I wonder how much they actually help. Granted they still somewhat increase the surface area for heat exchange. I tried to see if I could buy just the heatsinks by themselves, but couldn't find anything, only a few SODIMM modules that already had these heat spreaders pre-installed.

[cadillacmike68]

OK, that explains the black applique on both sides of one of my T42 RAM modules.

[RealBlackStuff]

OTOH, those fins/heatspreaders apparently do next to nothing and are hardly worth the effort/expense.
Mostly people just want them for looks!
If they were of any normal/useful use (not talking about overclocking here), we would have seen reviews about them.
But I couldn't find any reviews, only some discussions like: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ra ... s.2127969/

[unixed]

With regards to memory undervolting, I only know of one case: in a Thinkpad X220, where DDR3L (1.35v) ran at the regular DDR3 voltage of 1.5v, apparently caused it to run hot and cause intermittent RAM errors. So the owner modified the system board to reduce the RAM voltage to 1.45V-- though it was still higher than the proper DDR3L voltage, the RAM errors disappeared.

Do you recall the origin of this reference? It would be interesting to see what was done and whether it can be applied to the three preceding generations.

[axur-delmeria]

Do you recall the origin of this reference? It would be interesting to see what was done and whether it can be applied to the three preceding generations.

I tried a google search. The only reference I found was me mentioning it in this forum back in 2018. Didn't realize it was that long ago. :O

I'll try to look for it though. Since I just replaced my X220's HDD with an SSD and haven't moved back all the files, I'll have to sift through the files in the old drive, hoping that I saved a copy.

What I remember that it was a board modification. He probably looked at the schematics, found the voltage regulator IC for the RAM slots, looked up its datasheet, and changed some passive components in order to change the output voltage.

[unixed]

That is why it is interesting; with the T61 NVIDIA GPUs binh physically set the ADP 3209 VID to lower the voltage supply which was the basis for later modding the vBIOS to achieve the same ends. There is no safety net like that provided by booting off the PCIE graphics card BIOS option here though, so seeing it done via hardware first would help stiffen the spine.

[TTY]

Thought I'd say hello to y'all and chime in with the BEST COMMUNITY EVER

Hello

[kfzhu1229]

OTOH, those fins/heatspreaders apparently do next to nothing and are hardly worth the effort/expense.
Mostly people just want them for looks!
If they were of any normal/useful use (not talking about overclocking here), we would have seen reviews about them.
But I couldn't find any reviews, only some discussions like: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ra ... s.2127969/

I ended up getting a dozen pairs of these copper based graphite coated heat spreaders here:
https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a1 ... b2pvsveb12
I ended up putting some on the 4GB DDR2 sticks and others on some DDR sticks on the Latitude C840 because the RAM stick was overheating so badly it was giving me bluescreens! It can't be a motherboard fault because all 3 of my C840's does this if I leave the sticks bare! That is because like the A31p, the Latitude C840 has a backplate for the northbridge to cool down but the DIMM B slot is right beside it getting all the heat! The temperature difference between DIMM A and B is so obvious that you can feel with your bare hands, even if you put a pair of identical sticks of much higher clocked PC-2700S!
I also put some on some lower quality 1GB DDR sticks with Adata chips that overheat and bluescreens even on something like a T42.
So far as far as I can tell both bluescreens went away and as the case of T42, it now passes memtest86 whereas before the stick would heat up and fail consistently at test #9. Sure there is also a copper pipe I have placed on top of the RAM stick but it was failing before as well, even with the copper pipe attached onto foil tape.
For the 4GB DDR2 sticks, it is really that the Dell Latitudes have thermal diodes underneath each RAM slots and the D830's bottom cover run hot, therefore the DIMM B stick also run hot, and sometimes it will run at Zone 4 (equivalent of Fan 7 on ThinkPads) on idle when the VRMs and MOSFETs heat up with charger attached! This thing will knock a few degrees out of it, enough for the Zone numbers to change, but outside of these dire overheating situations it probably doesn't do much.
That said though it is more like US$1.5 for a pair (both sides of the DIMM) so I don't mind buying a dozen of them, and you might wanna put them on valuable RAM sticks like 4GB DDR2 sticks to hopefully prolong their lifespan by some time.

[crashnburn]

Thought I'd say hello to y'all and chime in with the BEST COMMUNITY EVER

Hello

Hola!

[crashnburn]

Thought I'd say hello to y'all and chime in with the BEST COMMUNITY EVER

Hello

Hola!