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Here's from the online service manual for a Dell E5420, a current model. Section called "Removing the processor".

Thanks. Is that uneven thermal paste along the edges:eek:? I just can't think of what else it might be.
 
The heatsinks that ship with new motherboard kits on some models, as well as replacement heatsinks, actually have a pad of thermal grease already applied, so that doesn't happen that badly on a normal production machine.
 
I hear moans of soldered ram.
Ram is not needed for 99% of operations and with an SSD you don't need ram anyway.

!

This is the dumbest thing I have heard hrere on MR. EVER. Not a Apple Fanboy, or Windows fanboy, am a techie. Some Apple fanboys really need to take thier head out of Apple's ass for a second a read first before posting.
Ram is not needed? What? Really? Ok, let me take my RAM out of every computer and Macbook and throw it away and just use SSD instead.... Its not like the motherboard will complain and not start and beeping at me...

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Also, dettachable RAM is always a source of hardware issues as contacts aren't always perfectly fit.

99.5% of computer ram sold is detachable. Do people not understand that? Any componenet in a PC or Mac will have hardware issues, like soldered RAM
 
This is the dumbest thing I have heard hrere on MR. EVER. Not a Apple Fanboy, or Windows fanboy, am a techie. Some Apple fanboys really need to take thier head out of Apple's ass for a second a read first before posting.
Ram is not needed? What? Really? Ok, let me take my RAM out of every computer and Macbook and throw it away and just use SSD instead.... Its not like the motherboard will complain and not start and beeping at me...

No, he's right. Ram is a legacy component these days. They were required for computers back in the late 80's because magnetic drives could only read at 5GB a second. These days SSDs are roughly 15 times as fast as even the fastest DDR3, and aren't crippled by motherboard latency because stupid Intel is too lazy to make better processors. The CPU can read right off them far quicker than having to rely on an intermediary dead medium like physical memory. I mean comeon. Haven't you heard about virtual memory? Even M% had base support for it as far back as Windows XP.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go huff some gas.
 
Before MS added virtual memory in XP, older versions of NT used a RAMdisk to hold the stuff that wouldn't fit in RAM.

While I know you're joking, I've heard of third-party RAMdisk software for XP that's able to get to the top gig on an i945-chipset (think the original x86 Macs) system with 4 GiB RAM, use it as a RAMdisk, and then put the swapfile in the RAMdisk.

Yes, using a RAMdisk to hold the stuff that wouldn't fit in RAM.
 
While I know you're joking, I've heard of third-party RAMdisk software for XP that's able to get to the top gig on an i945-chipset (think the original x86 Macs) system with 4 GiB RAM, use it as a RAMdisk, and then put the swapfile in the RAMdisk.

Yes, using a RAMdisk to hold the stuff that wouldn't fit in RAM.

And that's quite a trick, since NT doesn't have a swapfile!

Seriously, though, some of those RAMdisks could use PAE space (the 36-bit (64 GiB) address extensions) and put huge pagefiles above 4 GiB.

Each process was still limited to 2 GiB (or 3 GiB) of private space, but you could have lots of them running.
 
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The heatsinks that ship with new motherboard kits on some models, as well as replacement heatsinks, actually have a pad of thermal grease already applied, so that doesn't happen that badly on a normal production machine.

Right, and it doesn't hurt to have a little bit ooze out over the package - as long as the layer between the chip and the sink is extremely thin.
 
You're asking for compact socket designs for 1.6Ghz data lines in a confined space. Yeah, it's just wires to the average person. But when you consider that each of those 100s of wires is an antenna and that it matters how long each is and whether or not the oxide layer that forms on the contact is going to cause too much resistance for a reliable data latch...... you're asking for a lot. Oh, and with the small amount of give they need to have, what about the fact that a thin laptop is more likely to have a certain amount of flex. So that if you moved the laptop while it's on, you might momentarily lose contact on a few pins of ram.

Yes. They could have engineered a socket. It would have taken them a few more years just for the socket because off the shelf sockets are too thick. (by the way, have you noticed that no matter if it's a mac or pc, the ram sockets are pretty much exactly the same on pretty much every machine? know why? Because they take too freakin long to engineer on their own so everybody gets the same ones.)

On to your second point: Glue. Why is glue considered poor design? Consider the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution's Carbon Fiber roof. Not only is it glued on, carbon fiber panels themselves are literally glue-soaked fabric. It takes less space than screws and rivets and modern adhesives are strong enough (when properly matched) to hold cars together.

they managed to make a proprietary connector for the SSD. they could have done so with the RAM but that would have cost a lot of money to design so they just soldered it. isn't solder worse for longevity between electrical connections than a connector of some sort? and MBP is thin, but it's not MBA thin. this is just my feeling but I think a soldered part is more likely to come undone from an accidental bump than something securely plugged.

carbon fiber is a glue-soaked fabric. so is plasterboard. plasterboard is crappy and used because it's cheaper than real wood or other quality materials. glue is generally a dead giveaway for manufacturing shortcuts. but I suspect the lancer car you speak of is made of those materials and uses glue so it can be lightweight, or maybe because metal hardware would crack the carbon fiber? but the purpose of the glued-in battery on the MBP is not weight reduction, it's for making the battery difficult to change out without being serviced by Apple. they are making it more and more difficult to upgrade parts. what else would it mean?
 
Right, and it doesn't hurt to have a little bit ooze out over the package - as long as the layer between the chip and the sink is extremely thin.

Although that layer admittedly looked uneven in thickness, too. Then again, that could very easily be due to more staying on the heatsink.
 
Although that layer admittedly looked uneven in thickness, too. Then again, that could very easily be due to more staying on the heatsink.

To me, the JPEG in the Dell service manual isn't of high enough quality to speculate about these details. It does seem to show some "ooze", but like you said we'd really need high resolution photos of both the CPU and the heatsink to understand any issues.
 
This is the dumbest thing I have heard hrere on MR. EVER. Not a Apple Fanboy, or Windows fanboy, am a techie. Some Apple fanboys really need to take thier head out of Apple's ass for a second a read first before posting.
Ram is not needed? What? Really? Ok, let me take my RAM out of every computer and Macbook and throw it away and just use SSD instead.... Its not like the motherboard will complain and not start and beeping at me...

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99.5% of computer ram sold is detachable. Do people not understand that? Any componenet in a PC or Mac will have hardware issues, like soldered RAM

Of course it will beep. The system is designed that way - to use RAM, and to beep if it's not there.

I think he was referring to the principle of computer operation, not how we've designed them in the contemporary era.

Ask yourself why RAM was invented in the first place? Its only function is to act as a buffer between the speeds of hard drives and speeds of the CPU's. It's now become a glorified store-and-fetch medium, and RAM will become less and less required as we develop our non-volatile high-speed flash memory to approach the speeds of CPU fetching cycles. I mean, if SSD's were as fast as RAM is now (which I'm sure is not too far off), will you complain about RAM then? Of course not.

The point is that with HDD's plenty of RAM was great and boosted speeds when you could reduce swapping to slow HDD. Now, if you had 2 GB RAM with an SSD, the "swapping" is so fast that it feels faster than a conventional HDD with significantly more RAM. That's why the MacBook Air's feel much faster than any other laptop with a conventional HDD even if it has less RAM.
 
this is wrong in so many ways....

Of course it will beep. The system is designed that way - to use RAM, and to beep if it's not there.

I think he was referring to the principle of computer operation, not how we've designed them in the contemporary era.

Ask yourself why RAM was invented in the first place? Its only function is to act as a buffer between the speeds of hard drives and speeds of the CPU's. It's now become a glorified store-and-fetch medium, and RAM will become less and less required as we develop our non-volatile high-speed flash memory to approach the speeds of CPU fetching cycles. I mean, if SSD's were as fast as RAM is now (which I'm sure is not too far off), will you complain about RAM then? Of course not.

The point is that with HDD's plenty of RAM was great and boosted speeds when you could reduce swapping to slow HDD. Now, if you had 2 GB RAM with an SSD, the "swapping" is so fast that it feels faster than a conventional HDD with significantly more RAM. That's why the MacBook Air's feel much faster than any other laptop with a conventional HDD even if it has less RAM.

Do you realize that a Core i7 can sustain 112 Gbps of memory bandwidth?

Do you realize that the fastest SATA interface is 6 Gbps?

It looks like memory is currently delivering about a factor of 20 faster that the theoretical max for disks. (And that's for raw bandwidth only - if we looked at latency it would be another 10 or 20 times faster.)

You argument is simply nonsense - no other way of describing it.
 
Do you realize that a Core i7 can sustain 112 Gbps of memory bandwidth?

Do you realize that the fastest SATA interface is 6 Gbps?

It looks like memory is currently delivering about a factor of 20 faster that the theoretical max for disks. (And that's for raw bandwidth only - if we looked at latency it would be another 10 or 20 times faster.)

You argument is simply nonsense - no other way of describing it.

And? Theoretical maximums within the CPU core aren't part of my argument. Nor did I deny that memory was faster than SSD's. I'm only referring to the decreasing relevance RAM will have as a "SPEC" part of a machine, as swapping to an SSD and back is less and less noticeable.

My point is that before SSD's, you wanted to avoid swapping at all costs due to the significant performance drop (owing mainly to poor random read/write performance of HDD's) - and thus you maxed out RAM.

With SSD's, having less RAM is less noticeable because the swap speed is so much greater and random access to the disk is so much faster. The faster SSD's get, the more we can manage with less RAM (or at least the normal amount of RAM for a computer will level off).

Edit: Maybe I should also clarify that I don't mean memory will be gone completely soon, obviously SSD's have a lot of catching up to do, and there will certainly be something "there" where RAM is now in 10 years. The question is will it look more like volatile RAM but faster, with faster SSD's nipping at its heels, or will it be non-volatile long term storage with the speed of RAM.
 
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they managed to make a proprietary connector for the SSD. they could have done so with the RAM but that would have cost a lot of money to design so they just soldered it. isn't solder worse for longevity between electrical connections than a connector of some sort? and MBP is thin, but it's not MBA thin. this is just my feeling but I think a soldered part is more likely to come undone from an accidental bump than something securely plugged.

carbon fiber is a glue-soaked fabric. so is plasterboard. plasterboard is crappy and used because it's cheaper than real wood or other quality materials. glue is generally a dead giveaway for manufacturing shortcuts. but I suspect the lancer car you speak of is made of those materials and uses glue so it can be lightweight, or maybe because metal hardware would crack the carbon fiber? but the purpose of the glued-in battery on the MBP is not weight reduction, it's for making the battery difficult to change out without being serviced by Apple. they are making it more and more difficult to upgrade parts. what else would it mean?

The memory controllers in the CPUs found in MacBooks are designed to use a parallel bus, versus the SSDs which are attached to a SATA bus that is serial. A standard SATA data cable has a connector with 7 pins—a send pair, a receive pair and 3 pins connected to ground. A DDR3 SO-DIMM has 204 pins, and there are 2 SO-DIMMs worth of RAM on these boards, so that would call for 408 pins altogether. SO-DIMMs are already a very highly engineered and mature product with an outline almost identical to the board space dedicated to RAM in the MBPR. Reinventing the wheel in this case would be an exercise in pointlessness. The best rationale I can provide for Apple not going the SO-DIMM route is that the location directly under the keyboard may be prone to flexing which could, over time, damage the rather delicate sockets. Soldered RAM is very unlikely to fail unless it is exposed to conditions extreme enough to ruin pretty much any component on that motherboard.

As for gluing the battery, the cells in this instance are not encapsulated in a rigid plastic case, so there are not a lot of options for securing them in place. You can't just drive a screw through a lithium-polymer battery and have everything be fine and dandy. The cells are also malleable, so other means of retention could come undone if they became slightly deformed from an impact. The only time you'd really need to remove them (unless you're doing a teardown for iFixit) is if they required replacement. In which case, I presume you just put a heat gun on them to soften up the glue and pry them out.

I mean, if SSD's were as fast as RAM is now (which I'm sure is not too far off), will you complain about RAM then? Of course not.

The SSD in the MBPR is bound by the SATA 6 Gb/s interface it is connected to and thus cannot exceed 600 MB/s. If Apple switched to a PCIe SSD, it would be limited by the total bandwidth of the PCIe connection. So even if they borrowed 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0 from the GPU, the SSD wouldn't be able to deliver more than 7.9 GB/s. In dual-channel mode, DDR3-1600 SDRAM provides 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth. The memory bus between the GT 650M and its gig of GDDR5 can operate at up to 80 GB/s. Despite how handily the performance of flash based storage has eclipsed that of its predecessors, it is unlikely to close the gap to DRAM speeds any time soon.
 
No, he's right. Ram is a legacy component these days. They were required for computers back in the late 80's because magnetic drives could only read at 5GB a second. These days SSDs are roughly 15 times as fast as even the fastest DDR3, and aren't crippled by motherboard latency because stupid Intel is too lazy to make better processors. The CPU can read right off them far quicker than having to rely on an intermediary dead medium like physical memory. I mean comeon. Haven't you heard about virtual memory? Even M% had base support for it as far back as Windows XP.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go huff some gas.

Then why do they even put ram in computers!!! Give me a break....

I am 100% all in with Apple Products - Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, Macbook, iPad,3=iPhone 4s, Apple TV, Final Cut, Motion, Aperture, iTunes the whole bit.

The problem I have is when people voice their opinions. If they are not praising APPLE PRODUCTS then the fanboys take offense and say something stupid like well duhhh don't buy the Mac then go buy a pc.

This is not a problem for normal people that use the computer to surf the internet, check emails, use iMovie, iPhoto and the like. Unfortunately for me it is a big deal... I invested a lot of TIME and money into this platform (Final Cut Pro, Aperture, Adobe CS5 Suite etc) its not just about the hardware and being able to switch on the drop of a hat.

The problem is that I would have to purchase hardware, ( no big deal ) software, ( cost a pretty penny!!! ) but more importantly learning curve for replacing Final Cut Pro etc....

Obviously people use their computers for different purposes, if you are taxing your computer due to video encoding etc your flash drive and other components will not last as long compared to somebody that just checks emails etc. That being said I would prefer that the new MBPR would at least allow me to change the SSD and the battery. The memory I could deal with but not having the option to change out SSD/Battery is a deal breaker.
 
Reality check here. Other laptops that are as thin, have been able to manage offering a product that was upgradeable. Imagine that.

There are other thin laptops, yes. Are they really as thin while being as wide, and with the same capacity battery? No. In most of the thin laptops I've seen, they've got a bump here or there to accomodate features like that.

Why does that matter? Because when you have a longer dimension, it's easier to apply pressure to flex the center. If you're using the sockets, you're consuming space.
 
they managed to make a proprietary connector for the SSD. they could have done so with the RAM but that would have cost a lot of money to design so they just soldered it. isn't solder worse for longevity between electrical connections than a connector of some sort? and MBP is thin, but it's not MBA thin. this is just my feeling but I think a soldered part is more likely to come undone from an accidental bump than something securely plugged.

carbon fiber is a glue-soaked fabric. so is plasterboard. plasterboard is crappy and used because it's cheaper than real wood or other quality materials. glue is generally a dead giveaway for manufacturing shortcuts. but I suspect the lancer car you speak of is made of those materials and uses glue so it can be lightweight, or maybe because metal hardware would crack the carbon fiber? but the purpose of the glued-in battery on the MBP is not weight reduction, it's for making the battery difficult to change out without being serviced by Apple. they are making it more and more difficult to upgrade parts. what else would it mean?

Soldering is better than a connector for electrical reliability by far except in one case: When your socket/frame applies downward pressure towards springed contacts in an environment that subjects the socketed device to thermal expansion/contraction AND shock at the same time. Then it just becomes harder to say which one's marginally better.

The lithium polymer battery is glued in to the MBP because gluing it is the best way to secure the battery. That it's hard to remove wasn't the point, just a side effect. Why is it the best?
1) screwing it down requires that whoever screws it down be able to measure how much pressure is applied to the battery. Applying too much pressure can cause the battery to puncture. Applying some sort of frame with edges can also puncture the battery if it expands from other failure.
2) letting it sit loosely means that it can slide around and eventually deform the battery, causing it to short internally, heat up, balloon out, and freak out customers as well as losing the battery.
3) padding it with an insulator means more heat is retained around the battery, reducing life.
4) gluing it allows for it to deform if problems occur, while reducing shock from carrying it around. If you took apart a removable battery pack, it's all glue in there too.

Let me know if you think of other ideas I haven't seen before. By the way, have I mentioned that I've taken apart at least 30 laptop battery packs in the last year for analysis including ones from macbook pros, dells latitudes, and toshiba satellites?
 
Just got my new MBP Retina. Boy this thing is cool. But I need yall's help here a bit.

For some reason, the lid is soldered shut, and I can't open it. I got out the soldering gun and got it open, but now I find the keys on the keyboard are all soldered down. Wait - now there's some gluue onn te sside stiikin to mmy yfingers wll try goffoff

Whew - that's fixed. This display is cool, but the solder holding on the hinge just came off so now my display is detached. I'll use some of the left over glue here - there - fixed. Power connecter is new and improved, but soldered to the side for some reason. At least it won't fall off when you least expect it.

But this keyboard thing is a mess, having to use external keyboard. But there's no ports that work anymore. Ah, hell. At least I got one before all you yahoos now didn't I?
 
Just got my new MBP Retina. Boy this thing is cool. But I need yall's help here a bit.

For some reason, the lid is soldered shut, and I can't open it. I got out the soldering gun and got it open, but now I find the keys on the keyboard are all soldered down. Wait - now there's some gluue onn te sside stiikin to mmy yfingers wll try goffoff

Whew - that's fixed. This display is cool, but the solder holding on the hinge just came off so now my display is detached. I'll use some of the left over glue here - there - fixed. Power connecter is new and improved, but soldered to the side for some reason. At least it won't fall off when you least expect it.

But this keyboard thing is a mess, having to use external keyboard. But there's no ports that work anymore. Ah, hell. At least I got one before all you yahoos now didn't I?

And I'm sure by now your fingers are soldered to the retina MacBook Pro ;)
 
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