"Please note: All Upgrades have been put on hold due to the double cost of Memory Modules. The option to upgrade the supported GPUs has been disabled on the booking page."
I recognized the name of the company from the YouTube videos they have posted. It is likely a legitimate business, but as they are in a region I am not in, I can't speak to their actual performance or reliability. Here is their YouTube page:
This seems to be a company in the UAE. I've noticed in general that the far (and middle) East have far more miscellaneous repair services companies than the West, and also more information online about it (albeit not in English.)
Yeah. Even a smaller town will have a random repair shop where a guy will replace phone screens, solder in a replacement power supply, and he seemingly has some kind of connection that can get him all these parts from Shenzhen. A comparable sized town in America won't have anything comparable other than a Dollar General selling phone chargers.
A comparable town in the US would absolutely have a local or franchise repair business doing those things. What neither of them will have in abundance are shops replacing BGA modules as an upgrade. For that it'd be major cities only.
At least in Australia, anything outside common phone repairs goes in to the "not worth it" basket. I had a USB-C port snap of a microphone, PCB pads were still fine, just needs someone to use a hot air gun to attach a new port. Repair stores didn't want to touch it.
And I can see the logic. Wages are so high that anything that they can't exactly know the repair time and success rate can easily exceed the device value. While in lower income countries they can afford to mess around for quite a while on repairs since the replacement cost is relatively massive.
I don’t think that is true. Ubiquitous access to free or low cost education is what makes this possible, and I certainly don’t see those kinds of businesses in towns of 50-100k people in the USA. There are people that are capable of that kind of work, of course, but they are employed by x corp or do contract work, and they are not competing with the cost of replacement consumers devices, since their rates would have to be > 150 an hour to stay in business.
Replacing components like a phone screen, yeah - but not the kind of thing the OP is talking about.
More like replacing a worn USB-C port on a random motherboard using a soldering iron, hot air station, and microscope, or tracking down an unknown failed component on a circuit board, or swapping a random surface-mount Motorola chip in the ECU of your early-2000s car. Sometimes there’s a whole market square where every shop specializes in one of these things.
Damn I have one of these and it is still good shit. It's the best one I think, the Asus ROG OC edition sitting in a razer core x external GPU. I want this but does it make sense? I'm guessing it doesn't make sense as I'd have to send it there.
I'd prefer some instructions on how to do this myself.
I have a 3090Ti, And it is still plenty performant for all the stuff I do. Especially considering modern pricing, I don't see me swapping for anything newer for a long time to come.
Honestly, I have a 2080ti that I use to play and I can tell you the math isn't there to upgrade it. It's much easier to just find a 3090/4090/5090 and keep pace with the software and hardware simultaneously.
It looks like for a while this was a way to work around the US tech bans in China. And cards with this mod pre-applied seem to be on ebay for about $500, which is cheaper than used 3090s from what I can see.
When I was a kid software that would "double your RAM" was a thing. I remember thinking it was awesome, and at the same time feeling a huge sense of doubt that you could do that.
AI has kinda already gone through that phase, with quantisation you can effectively double your ram with almost no negative effects by going from fp16 to int8.
I’m surprised the concept of drivespace/double space died off. Maybe most files self-compress well from their native app, but I’m sure it’s not universal. OSs don’t seem to offer a prompt to compress relatively unused files and transparently uncompressed them on-demand.
Definitely not. DOS had disk compression utilities, but not RAM - there was no reasonable way to accomplish that at the time.
You may be thinking of "memory manager" utilities like QEMM and EMM386 which tried to maximize the amount of conventional memory available to programs (i.e. below the 640KB boundary). These programs worked primarily by causing drivers and TSRs to run in upper memory - they didn't actually provide more memory.
Oh right! I got disk compression and QEMM and EMM386 all mixed together in my now decades old memory (pun kind of intended) of DOS to produce that false recollection.
Both of your statements are not true. Freezone LLCs do not require Emaratis. Even if the company is owned by an Emarati one absolutely can bring legal action against the company.
You mean, that if I could have used this service, it would have been a scam and that such scams are common in the UAE, so in the future people should avoid repair companies in the UAE regardless of the specific vendor?
That seems a bit of a stretch, but I have never dealt with the UAE, is this a real thing that people know about?
Scam has started to become overused like the word slop. Scam has a specific meaning. Sounds like you are complaining about a potential problem while a scam is a guaranteed problem
A 2080Ti is approximately on a level with a 5060Ti (from a quick search), though obvs does not support the newer DLSS features etc. So to get a good upgrade you’re looking at a 5070 or better.
If this gives you a performance boost for less $$$ …
"Please note: All Upgrades have been put on hold due to the double cost of Memory Modules. The option to upgrade the supported GPUs has been disabled on the booking page."
https://youtube.com/@graphicscardrepairs-tk7ql?si=OIO98TbmAs...
You can't expect him to waste weekend fixing something for pennies.
Unlike a guy living in shed, driving 20+ yo Daewoo Lanos.
And I can see the logic. Wages are so high that anything that they can't exactly know the repair time and success rate can easily exceed the device value. While in lower income countries they can afford to mess around for quite a while on repairs since the replacement cost is relatively massive.
https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/01/16/professional-line-s...
And it's not that expensive.
I'd prefer some instructions on how to do this myself.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinese-work...
It looks like for a while this was a way to work around the US tech bans in China. And cards with this mod pre-applied seem to be on ebay for about $500, which is cheaper than used 3090s from what I can see.
https://downloadmoreram.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace
And some machines I’ve used, had swap on zram…
You may be thinking of "memory manager" utilities like QEMM and EMM386 which tried to maximize the amount of conventional memory available to programs (i.e. below the 640KB boundary). These programs worked primarily by causing drivers and TSRs to run in upper memory - they didn't actually provide more memory.
That seems a bit of a stretch, but I have never dealt with the UAE, is this a real thing that people know about?
The 2080ti is what, 8 years old at this point? Upgrading the RAM is throwing good money after bad.
A 2080Ti is approximately on a level with a 5060Ti (from a quick search), though obvs does not support the newer DLSS features etc. So to get a good upgrade you’re looking at a 5070 or better.
If this gives you a performance boost for less $$$ …