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Soldering 1 gig chip on 12" Powerbook logic board

California

California

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Aug 21, 2004
3,885
90
Love my 12" PB 1.5ghz. Running Leopard on it. But the memory cap of 1.25gb with 256gb soldered on to the board (and only one memory slot) bugs me. Especially since this is the same logic board that goes into the 12" iBooks last revision that have 512mb soldered on to their boards. (Their memory cap is 1.5gbs and it does make a difference, especially on the 1.42ghz iBooks).

I just asked Gary Dailey of Daystar if they could solder a 1 gig chip on the board.. seems like a better "upgrade" than overclocking with Leopard's memory demands...

Will let MR know if this can be done. If so, i'm in.
 
i would say it is fairly impossible
you would need a machine to apply the solder, a human is nowhere near precise enough
 
Why not just stick with Tiger which is more than happy to run with 1.25GB?. I dunno seems like an awful lot to go through just for a RAM upgrade then again that may be your thing
 
I'd say it's a cool project, so long as Daystar doesn't charge too terribly much. The 12" PB's are fantastic machines, imo.
 
daneoni said:
Why not just stick with Tiger which is more than happy to run with 1.25GB?. I dunno seems like an awful lot to go through just for a RAM upgrade then again that may be your thing
Click to expand...

Using Time Machine is a plus. Running Leopard about as fast as Tiger with Dashboard disabled on this powerbook.

We'll see what Gary says.

Might be a better upgrade option than the CPU overclocks they were doing.
 
I want to do this too. Let me know how this works. If not, I may have to sell my mint condition 1.5ghz pb :(
 
alphaod said:
$250US for the job? :eek:
Click to expand...

Daystar used to charge I think five hundred or more to bump the CPU on powerbooks to like 1.93ghz. But they got too hot.

I think it was like 650 USD to bump the 12" powerbook's CPU to 1.67ghz.

Soldering a new memory chip on it can't be THAT hard...

And it would really make the 12" PB sing.
 
Did you hear back?

I was just wondering if you heard back and what they had to say. I'm in almost exactly the same situation and was thinking of contacting them myself, but I decided to do a search first to see if anyone else had the same idea. I'd love to know what their response was.

regards,
klinux
 
It's cool that this thread was brought back. I've always wondered this myself, especially when working on the iBooks. Just soldering on larger capacity memory chips, is that are there is too it? Will the main board accept and see the larger chips?
 
I remember buying an iBook G4 and taking a 384MB RAM model (128MB Soldered + 256MB Dimm). It was surprising how well the system ran considering.

I often wondered about how difficult it would be to remove the 128MB chip that was soldered to the board and put in a 256 or 512 chip.

Whatever came of the original posters machine? I am curious :)
 
This is 100% possible and should be done. I have done my share of soldering surface mount stuff and it is not fun or easy at all. And there is a failure rate. However there just are some people out there with hands of "god" that can do it. There are also tools to use which aid the process significantly such as a special attachment to a heat gun and solder paste which is basically glue and then heat activated. Are there any updates on this?
 
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