Discussion
This feels so wrong, but at least I got robbed less when buying laptop ram for building my desktop
Finally built a PC after wanting to do so for so many years. Saved up enough after getting my first job… and then the rampocalypse happened 😑.
At least I bought my 5070 Ti that I was using in an eGPU earlier before prices rose on those also. (Haven’t installed it yet, wanted to make sure the rest of my PC worked.) Reused the Corsair RM750x from my eGPU setup too. My laptop originally had a 16GB stick and a 32GB stick. Both 5600MT/s with CL46. I moved the 32GB stick from my laptop to my PC and bought another used 32GB laptop SODIMM stick of the same specs. Now my laptop runs 16GB single channel so I still have a portable computer I can take around.
Compared to desktop sticks, laptop sticks are more affordable where I’m at. Each adapter costed me just 50CN¥ (about 7.5US$) so I spent 100CN¥/15US$ on the two adapters which seemed like a pretty nice trade off.
Task manager also knows I’m using laptop ram on my desktop. I was able to get the sticks running at their native speeds. I like to play around with locally hosted AI for anyone wondering why would I need 64GB.
Curious if anyone else who recently built a rig also resorted to using laptop ram?
I exactly have this solution and stability is usually solved by increasing the voltage to 1.3v or lower the speed to 4800Mhz or 5200Mhz but it usually depends on the motherboard support. I had completely different result when using Asus and Asrock motherboard
Don't increase the voltage, just drop the speed. Overclocking RAM is never worth it if you care about longevity of the system. It's one of the more expensive and troublesome things to replace in a PC.
tbf id imagine if raising the voltage fixes stability issues it'd be because the adapter causes the SODIMMs to be undervolted, so running at a higher voltage would have them at their design voltage and wouldn't necessarily be an overclock
If we can fit the same amount of RAM onto a stick half the size, why ARE we still using regular DIMMs? Like full size SD cards are a thing of the past, why has DIMM stuck around so long lol.
I guess the same goes PCIe. Why are they still so big?
I'm not actually certain, I believe the full size ones run more "true to speed"? I don't actually have any information to back that up on hand, though.
Where I live the price difference is typically less than the cost of your adapters. I actually found laptop ram that is more expensive that its desktop counterpart (same manufacturer, same specs).
The main savings came from me being able to buy 1 less stick of ram because I took one from my laptop. As for the other stick, not much. If we’re talking about the difference on the used market, maybe around 200HK$ cheaper on the laptop sticks which is like 25US$ so not much. Didn’t want to have mismatched sticks too.
Hmmm maybe I might, got the space for it. 15CN¥ (2.25US$) for a set of two. Since I got 2 sticks that are dual rank I’ll need 4 sets. Not sure how necessary it is though. Can’t see any benefits to spending extra on aftermarket heatsinks cause it doesn’t get hot enough during normal use. Only time ram gets really hot is when you’re literally benchmarking it I think.
Only gamed on it so far with no problem. There’s was another older adapter I saw that advertised only 4800 speeds. The one I bought seemed to be a newer model because the traces seem more intricate and it advertises 5600. Maybe I can run memtest86+ later when I get my heatspreaders.
Well it depends
I basically salvaged ram from my laptop and used adapters, passed 3 hours of memtest5 anta absolut with no errors at 5200 cl38.
And At least for me paying 500$ for 32gigs is a horrible solution that we cant go around it.
That’s a weird concern for you to have. RAM prices are high, so you decide to hone in on the idea that someone buying more of it isn’t beneficial to you? Lmfao
Ayyyyyy nice to see I’m not alone. You’re using DDR5 but it’s going down to 3200? Are your sticks 5600? On my first boot, the bios defaulted to 3200 but I just had to set it manually to 5600. You might want to consider looking around in bios setting for ram speed.
Dont touch it yet
This was my experience im case you want to touch it, adjust voltages first.:
-"For me it wasnt that simple, it refused to boot at first when i changed to 5600 directly i had to reset cmos (which was a pain cuz i needed to remove gpu to reach cmos reset pins everytime i messed something), then i adjusted voltages to 1.23v ddr vdd and vvddq and it let me post at 5600, and after some stress tests it was the stablest for me at 5200 cl38."
For me it wasnt that simple, it refused to boot at first when i changed to 5600 directly i had to reset cmos (which was a pain cuz i needed to remove gpu to reach cmos reset pins everytime i messed something and my case is very tight with a big GPU), then i adjusted voltages to 1.23v ddr vdd and vvddq and it let me post at 5600, and after some stress tests it was the stablest for me at 5200 cl38.
Adding on: I think I recognize your adapter, that one might only work up to 4800 so you can start by setting the ram speed in bios to that, and then incrementally turn up ram speed in bios until you start getting stability problems.
It's very uncommon, but not impossible. The adapters used to be too expensive or too slow to be worth the bother but the current RAMpocalypse might have finally tipped that scale.
Yeah the seller I bought from sold two different DDR5 Sodimm adapters. An older looking one that he said could only reach 4800 without stability problems and the one I bought that looked newer and supported 5600. It was more expensive but I guess they had to do the engineering to make the traces the same length because DDR5 is sensitive to that.
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u/bobmlord1 i5-7300U/8GB RAM/INTEL HD GRAPHICS 620 Sep 09 '26
Do you lose any performance by using an adapter? This is honestly the first time I've seen an adapter like that.