16GB to 32GB Soldered RAM Upgrade - 2018 MacBook Pro 15-inch - 4K

In today's video, we will

upgrade

these

soldered

RAM chips from 16GB to 32GB capacity in the A1990 15-

inch

macbook

pro

2018

. This 15-

inch

macbook

pro retina was sent to us by Laskar Sonas Productions, a professional product management company. events that provides update services. conceptualization, 3D creative design, even event consultation. With their vast experience in the industry, they are committed to accelerating ideas to make your event unique and successful. The Mac we have today uses the 6-core 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 8th generation Coffee Lake processors. Since this is the base model, it has 16GB of RAM by default and the end user cannot easily

upgrade

it to 32GB later as it was

soldered

to the logic board.

We've covered the three digits of the serial number here to prevent others from stealing it, but yes, we know some of you will still think this is a fake video. Anyway, we have also purchased the 64GB RAM chips for the 2019 16-inch model and will upgrade to 64GB in a future release. so make sure to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss the video. Before disassembling the entire Mac and updating the logic board, we will perform initial quality control of all MacBook hardware, from the keyboard, microphone, USB-C ports, battery, and all other related hardware, completing our quality control form template.

We have upgraded hundreds (not thousands yet) of RAM soldered to our customer's macbook pro, and this is the method we believe is the best way to prevent and control damage to the logic board. We have uploaded the quality control form template in the video description below. After the macbook passes the initial quality control stage, we can begin disassembling the entire mac to gain access to the RAM soldered onto the logic board. We have safely removed the logic board from the chassis, so the RAM chips on top have been soldered under this black adhesive cover and if you flip the board to the bottom you will find another black label of the same size.

Removing the cover with a knife and alcohol will expose 8 RAM chips at the bottom with a capacity of 1 gigabyte per chip, flip it to the top and removing it will expose another 8 RAM chips also with 1 gigabyte capacity per chip. The chip and the sum of the RAM chips on the top and bottom sides make a total of 16 RAM chips and therefore constitute the 16 gigabyte capacity that we saw in the system report. So the math is pretty simple now, right? Upgrading to 32 GB of RAM capacity simply means that we need to replace all of these 1 gigabyte chips with 2 gigabytes of capacity, so 16 chips multiplied by 2 gigabytes equals 32 GB of total RAM. now since we are paranoid that these plastic stickers will melt due to heat we will remove them all starting with the t2 plastic cover, gpu vram, battery inductor, toshiba ssd nands, right lightning, toshiba nands again, left lightning and finally wi-fi antennas.

Flip to the bottom and remove the heatsink screw to separate the entire heatsink and don't forget to remove the LCD flex cable as well. Remove the heat sink, turn it to the top and we will change the view to the microscope. As you can see from the chip marking, it is clearly engraved with d9vpp and also with the micron M logo. Start creating rectangular lines by lightly scraping around the perimeter of the ram chip, as these lines will help place the new chips later. so here is the first one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, now switch to the lower side and repeat the same steps starting from one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight chips.

Well, I'm starting to sound like a morning stretching program, right? I'll let the screen do the following counting for you. So now you are ready to remove the RAM chip. Also, don't forget to remove the GPU cover if you doubt the heat. Carefully place the logic board on the infrared heater glass, in this case we use the jovy re-8500 BGA rework station. Once you have aligned the laser with the center of the target, place the thermocouple in the local ram area and begin preheating the main logic board with the bottom heater profile. We are aiming the bottom heater to reach around 140 to 150 degrees celsius and once it has reached the target temperature, pause the bga profile and the temperature should stay as it is.

Then use the fast hot air with the maximum air and heat setting as the top heater and of course in this case the heat is controlled by adjusting the distance from the target. As you heat the ram chips from the top, you can see that they seem easy to remove because the bottom preheater already adds 70% of the heat needed to reach the liquid temperature for lead-free solder. So we're going to gently hold the ram chip, not removing it yet, while moving the hot air quickly around the circumference of the chip back and forth until you can move the chip and get it out.

Once you have removed all the RAM chips on top, slowly blow the air compressor from a distance to cool the entire logic board. Once it has cooled down, flip the board to the other side and start the bottom IR profile again until the board temperature reaches 140-150 degrees Celsius and finally remove the RAM chips using the same method again. So the ram on both sides has been safely removed. Now let's switch to the microscope view and do a quick visual inspection to see if we knocked anything over. Okay, yeah, we did it here, it's a capacitor, so now we'll fix it quickly.

So now we are at the top and we will add flux to all the pads while going over the surface with leaded solder wire to facilitate the absorption process later. Next, we can start removing the lead-free solder from the first, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and clean up the whole mess with a Q-tip and 99 isopropyl alcohol. Then, turn it to the bottom and repeat the steps. Same steps on all 8x RAM footprints. After both sides have been thoroughly cleaned, the logic board is now ready for the new RAM chips. These are the 32GB RAM chips we have in stock and each chip has 78 pre-made solder balls.

Under the microscope you can see that it fits perfectly with the lines of the rectangle we drew earlier. Then this is what you are waiting for, the serial number of the ram chip is h5anag8namr uhc, a ddr4 ram chip produced by sk hynix. Next, we'll apply solder flux to the 8 RAM footprints on top of the logic board and carefully align the 32GB chip into the rectangles we created earlier for this footprint number one, two, three, four, five, six , seven. 8, be sure to check the orientation of each of the RAM chips by checking the board view if you haven't used this board view software yet, check out pauldaniel's flexbv.

So that the RAM chips are properly placed on top, let's go to the BGA rework station to solder them all. As usual, gently place the plate on the glass of the infrared heater, then the thermocouples are placed outside the ram shield and run the same bottom heater profile as before. After the temperature of the thermocouple on the logic board reaches 150 degrees Celsius, open the top rapid hot air and blow it all towards the ram chips with a circular motion. It can be clearly seen that the RAM chips are as if "sitting" in place. Then slowly blow on the air compressor to remove all the heat and remove the logic board from the heater. so the ram chips on top look pretty good. then, flip to the bottom, repeat the same steps again starting with applying flux on footprint number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and followed by placing the ram chip on one, two , three four. , five, six, seven, eight and check if all the ram chips have been properly aligned with the correct orientation and take them back to the infrared heater.

So everything went very well and all the RAM chips were successfully soldered on both sides. Next, we will head to the PCH area and find the RAM configuration strap. Open the schematics and find the RAM configuration. It is usually stated on the Bill of Materials page and sometimes they will give you a truth table. So according to the schematic diagram for Hynix 32GB RAM, you need to lower L, to all ramcfg0, ramcfg1, ramcfg2, 3 and 4 pins by filling all the pull-down resistors in their respective positions. The pull down resistors can be found on page 15. So if we are looking at the board we need to fill in the missing resistors r1530 and r1532.

If you are not sure how to read the settings, you can click on this video we made explaining the working principle of ram belts. We will then partially reassemble the entire Mac just for the final QA test to make sure all the hardware is working and nothing was damaged during the upgrade process. Only necessary screws will be installed and please note that this is not the final delivery condition. Now the moment of truth, we will plug in the charger, open the lid and see if it turns on. We'll speed this up to the desktop. So let's open about this Mac and yes, now it has 32 GB of RAM, open the system report and the memory tab also shows 16 GB + 16 GB.

So we're almost done here, this Mac will be passed to the QA technicians for the final QA check before the entire Mac is completely reassembled and delivered to the customer. Each hardware must be checked again and this time we will fill in the right column on the quality control form. Everything seems to be working fine, that's all! This is the before and after of the RAM upgrade process, I hope you enjoyed this video and make sure to subscribe and like the video if you like it and see you again on the iboffrcc channel, reverse engineering at its finest.

Have a nice day and thanks for watching!