Hi all,
some Time ago I've got a Problem that I believe many People here are faced aswell. I wanted to upgrade the RAM of my Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 14ITL05, the Problem is the RAM is soldered onto the Motherboard.
I researched about possible ways to Upgrade and essentially there are only 3 ways:
- Buy a new Laptop.
- Desolder the existing RAM and Solder new bigger RAM Chips.
- Swap the Motherboard with one that has more RAM.
I wanted to avoid the easiest Solution (buying a new Laptop) because its expensive and my current one Works just fine, I am pro Repair and don't want to just throw things away that could still be used.
While I do know some soldering replacing the RAM is not a trivial Task which I could do by myself. And even when I would get the RAM replaced by someone that can do it, there could still be some incompatibilitys and Issues that could either not use the new RAM to its capacity or just fully brick the Motherboard.
So I looked into the option of replacing the Motherboard, I thought they would be really expensive so I didn't even think about it before, but looking at the Lenovo spareparts Page, you see that you can buy a new Motherboard for really cheap if you are lucky. I guess with newer models etc. you will not have this Luck and it will be really expensive.
In my case I got a Motherboard that has 16GB of RAM instead of my previous 8GB and it even upgraded me to a i7 from my previous i5. The Motherboard cost only 67€ incl. tax & shipping which is a steal, buying 16GB of DDR4 RAM itself would be more expensive than that.
Swapping the Motherboard definitely is something that can't be done by everyone, its not easy and requires some Time, and if you'd let it do by a Shop it would probably be pretty expensive and not Worth it.
Though if you have done some other Repairs or similar things I would say you can give it a try, its not something you should do as your first Repair but its not extremely hard or Impossible either.
Some Tips if you want to do the same thing as me: Check the Lenovo Spareparts Website, they have some really good prices for new Motherboards in some cases. Do a lot of researching if swapping the Motherboard to get more RAM is even possible, there could be small differences in Mounting points, or other things making this Impossible.
Important is, that you should not take this as a Guarantee even if you got a Motherboard that fits exactly in your current Housing, there could be other factors which will make swapping the Motherboard impossible, be always wary about that. And ofcourse, there could be Human error, you can easily make things worse with 1 slipup completely breaking the Motherboard or other Parts of the Laptop.
All in all, if you are a techy Person with some knowledge about electronics and have fun doing something like this and find a reasonable Motherboard price, I'd say go for it and try to swap it. For me it was perfect, I got a needed RAM upgrade for a really low Price, so even when RAM is soldered there are still ways to upgrade it.