It would be useful to see some statistics about how many soldered RAM actually malfunction due to manufacture defect. As I mentioned, a person from a PC repair shop told he didn't encounter any issues with soldered RAM on Lenovo Thinkpad's specifically.
Can it affect running 3d modelling software, like CADs or Blender, on an integrated graphics card with shared (dynamic) memory?
As mentioned here [1], at least on a Dell XPS laptop while diy upgrading soldered RAM, it is necessary to resolder a resistor from 1 to 0 position on the board to tell BIOS what RAM to expect.
Maybe for E14 thinkpads it is also possible to perform a similar thing, to diy rewire the board to ignore the malfunctioning soldered RAM and use the socketed RAM instead. But how to get all the original thinkpad system board schematics?
I remember seeing that article when it was posted on HN. The stencil alignment looks very intimidating and the entire process is obviously much more difficult than a SO-DIMM replacement, but it's good to know that upgrading soldered RAM may be possible in some cases for those willing to take on the challenge.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1428808/can-i-disable-one-sl...
"There isn't anyway to disable RAM as far as I know, but there is a way to have Ubuntu ignore the bad RAM, but you need to know the addresses of the RAM in question."
Can someone evaluate the plausibility of this?
On the other hand, basing on this Dell laptop diy rewiring case, if soldering all Serial Prescence Detect module resistors to position 0 can make BIOS to expect zero soldered RAM and switch to socketed RAM , such soldering seems doable moderately easily by yourself.