pc gamer Dells new laptop features proprietary DDR5 module, won't take generic RAM

[ENTERPRISE]

Quote

Dell has named this memory Compression Attached Memory Module or CAMM, and it uses a different form factor than the typical generic DDR5 RAM. 

There are reasons for the move, aside from money. This single piece of RAM is looking to replace two SO-DIMM memory slots and looks to save a fair amount of space. It's likely helped the company to make a smaller lighter weight laptop than before, but it's also locked users into its new CAMM system. So no doubt money is a fairly big factor.

Source

 

Why Dell, just why?

[Sir Beregond]

Sounds like a very Dell thing to do.

[Mr. Fox]

Dell (and Alienware) will always be Dell. I had to stop asking why around 2012. They aspire to be equivalent of Apple in nearly every sense. Dell used to be a good brand. And, it's sad how often we get to say that about so many things, not just Dell. Mass production of cheap junk that is thin, lightweight, and uses as little power as possible, are the areas of focus in the tech world. Performance, quality and serviceability are no longer high on the list of priorities. The more crap they solder to the motherboard and the more pieces (like RAM, laptop AC adapters, desktop PSUs, etc.) that are made proprietary through form factor, firmware, etc. the more reliant the consumers become on the OEM they bought from. What is serviced is sourced almost exclusively  from the OEM, and when something is not serviced they intend to sell a replacement computer. No upgrades, enhancements or repairs. It makes sense that some of this occurs because they are in business to make money, but it comes at the expense of the customer being trapped and enslaved to the machine. Their patrons are merely "end users" now and not customers in the traditional sense. They are doing what is best for the company and the end user is source of funding for their machine.

 

In practical application they own the product, the process and the end user that subscribes to the privilege to use it. It is more like renting a computer than owning one. Someone else decides, in advance, what you get to do with it. A very despicable Mac-like business model in so many ways.

 

 

Edited April 20, 2022 by Mr. Fox

[Sir Beregond]

Dude, I'm not gettin' a Dell!

[Papusan]

16 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Dude, I'm not gettin' a Dell!

Dell is the bellwether in tech industri for (windows computers). The other OEMs will follow afterwards. Proprietary design is their trademark.  

 

Enjoy the beauty... Dell proprietary (non-standard) ATX design - Proprietary parts in modern dell desktops

Edited April 20, 2022 by Papusan

[ENTERPRISE]

Remember its also about the additional E-Waste issue. If we want to hit those green targets, this sort of practice needs to be stopped, across the board. Problem is that money talks and the likelihood of an exterior body being able to ban proprietary nonsense is slim.

[J7SC_Orion]

nothing unusual for DELL, though they're hard to out_Apple Apple re. proprietary nonsense that increases eWaste

[Papusan]

14 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

Remember its also about the additional E-Waste issue. If we want to hit those green targets, this sort of practice needs to be stopped, across the board. Problem is that money talks and the likelihood of an exterior body being able to ban proprietary nonsense is slim.

Dell will turn this mess it into something good and say it will reduce the E-waste. They will promote this new proprietary solution (this new scam), is better than use soldered on memory chips. That you will struggle obtain replacement parts for failing HW after the warranty expiration (due not paying their Premium extended support) doesn't matter for them. Yep, people can't buy spare parts from Dell for their computers if the obligatory warranty have expired. Dell's poilicy at it's best.  In short... Throw your computer in the dust bin (e-waste) if it has minor failes and instead visit Dell sale for a purchase of new computer/lap-joke.  

 

The ugly truth....

 

 

 Yep, new designed/engineered proprietary HW parts is bad for the consumers. And bad for the environment. 

Edited April 21, 2022 by Papusan

[Darkpriest667]

As someone more intimately aware of what you all are talking about you need to understand two things about Dell.

 

1) Their primary concern is for business class customers not consumers. Those customers typically pay for extended prosupport and prosupport plus warranties

    a) They make 10 times as much selling Enterprise class hardware like blade servers and the like than they do on the client side of hardware like desktops and laptops. The Enterprise class service from Dell is top notch, NO ONE has better enterprise customer service for hardware. If you have a part down they guarantee in North America 4 hour turn around. GUARANTEE IT. 

 

2) They are obligated, by law, to be energy efficient with every part on client hardware. The standard consumer ATX boards(and power supplies) we use in our rigs do not meet those specifications for the most part. So this "Steve" from Gamers Nexus Ewaste argument is arduous and pedantic at best. Steve doesn't know a damn thing about OEM requirements across multiple jurisdictions for client hardware. I do because it's part of my job. If Steve, or any of you, want to offer your expertise and design a new board schematic that can produced at volume with literally a .5% margin and the parts go go with it that can be universal in several models of system. PLEASE DO IT. Dell doesn't just produce 1 million ewaste boards they produce 1.5 million because their parts delivery (prepandemic) was 24 hour turn around on client. That means you have to have a # of parts strategically placed all over the world in case something fails. 

 

That's why some of their servers cost, and I mean literally, a million dollars. 4 hour turnaround time on parts meaning they built the thing 2 or 3 times if you bought one.


EDIT -- by the way to Dell, Alienware is a consumer product not a business class product and that DOES make a difference when it comes to parts availability.

Edited April 22, 2022 by Darkpriest667

[Avacado]

15 minutes ago, Darkpriest667 said:

As someone more intimately aware of what you all are talking about you need to understand two things about Dell.

 

1) Their primary concern is for business class customers not consumers. Those customers typically pay for extended prosupport and prosupport plus warranties

    a) They make 10 times as much selling Enterprise class hardware like blade servers and the like than they do on the client side of hardware like desktops and laptops. The Enterprise class service from Dell is top notch, NO ONE has better enterprise customer service for hardware. If you have a part down they guarantee in North America 4 hour turn around. GUARANTEE IT. 

 

2) They are obligated, by law, to be energy efficient with every part on client hardware. The standard consumer ATX boards(and power supplies) we use in our rigs do not meet those specifications for the most part. So this "Steve" from Gamers Nexus Ewaste argument is arduous and pedantic at best. Steve doesn't know a damn thing about OEM requirements across multiple jurisdictions for client hardware. I do because it's part of my job. If Steve, or any of you, want to offer your expertise and design a new board schematic that can produced at volume with literally a .5% margin and the parts go go with it that can be universal in several models of system. PLEASE DO IT. Dell doesn't just produce 1 million ewaste boards they produce 1.5 million because their parts delivery (prepandemic) was 24 hour turn around on client. That means you have to have a # of parts strategically placed all over the world in case something fails. 

 

That's why some of their servers cost, and I mean literally, a million dollars. 4 hour turnaround time on parts meaning they built the thing 2 or 3 times if you bought one.


EDIT -- by the way to Dell, Alienware is a consumer product not a business class product and that DOES make a difference when it comes to parts availability.

It is good to read the other side of the argument here and I understand it from a business perspective. That being said, no one on this site is running current enterprise level equipment in their basement and we are indeed consumers. We have that view on the topic. 

[Sir Beregond]

What they do on the enterprise side doesn't excuse bad practices on the consumer side, much of which requires time and money on their part to design such proprietary parts and in doing so, planned obsolescence. If their concern is business class (which I agree it is), why are they spending the time and money developing all this proprietary stuff on the consumer side you find literally any time you open up a Dell system?

 

Doesn't make sense to me and them being a great business solution doesn't excuse crappy practices on the consumer side. So their concern is business class, cool seems to me you'd want to use standardized parts on the consumer level then so you can keep more money and time devoted to your business segment. Something doesn't jive.

Edited April 22, 2022 by Sir Beregond

[cscoder4ever]

Who does Dell think they are? Apple?

At least Apple has MacOS

[schuck6566]

1 hour ago, Sir Beregond said:

What they do on the enterprise side doesn't excuse bad practices on the consumer side, much of which requires time and money on their part to design such proprietary parts and in doing so, planned obsolescence.

The money from the repeated consumer purchases every couple of years because parts can't be upgraded also helps to buffer the possible losses from the great turn around time on repairs for enterprise customers. but we won't mention how the consumer is always placed last compared to the people who lease....

[ENTERPRISE]

4 hours ago, Darkpriest667 said:

As someone more intimately aware of what you all are talking about you need to understand two things about Dell.

 

1) Their primary concern is for business class customers not consumers. Those customers typically pay for extended prosupport and prosupport plus warranties

    a) They make 10 times as much selling Enterprise class hardware like blade servers and the like than they do on the client side of hardware like desktops and laptops. The Enterprise class service from Dell is top notch, NO ONE has better enterprise customer service for hardware. If you have a part down they guarantee in North America 4 hour turn around. GUARANTEE IT. 

 

2) They are obligated, by law, to be energy efficient with every part on client hardware. The standard consumer ATX boards(and power supplies) we use in our rigs do not meet those specifications for the most part. So this "Steve" from Gamers Nexus Ewaste argument is arduous and pedantic at best. Steve doesn't know a damn thing about OEM requirements across multiple jurisdictions for client hardware. I do because it's part of my job. If Steve, or any of you, want to offer your expertise and design a new board schematic that can produced at volume with literally a .5% margin and the parts go go with it that can be universal in several models of system. PLEASE DO IT. Dell doesn't just produce 1 million ewaste boards they produce 1.5 million because their parts delivery (prepandemic) was 24 hour turn around on client. That means you have to have a # of parts strategically placed all over the world in case something fails. 

 

That's why some of their servers cost, and I mean literally, a million dollars. 4 hour turnaround time on parts meaning they built the thing 2 or 3 times if you bought one.


EDIT -- by the way to Dell, Alienware is a consumer product not a business class product and that DOES make a difference when it comes to parts availability.

That was a good read. However whichever way you dress it, whether Enterprise or Consumer technology, Dell are still creating a product component that does not need to be proprietary. Whichever way its cut, they are creating a fringe product which is harder to service. Will businesses with Enterprise class gear want additional freedoms when it comes to replacement parts, from experience I can say yes. Remember that not all Enterprise gear is sitting in fortune 500 basements where they can afford to throw money at extended warranties and support and afford to pay the "proprietary" tax so to speak. Even if you can throw money at it, that does not mean it gives Dell a greenlight to create proprietary gear. 

 

Going further from this, Enterprise gear ALWAYS finds it's way down the ladder to your average joe consumers. This is AWESOME as lt for the most part can be readily re-used/repurposed by anyone, rather than it being dumped. Anything that is proprietary tends to have a short life. Enterprise gear does not stay in service for a long time in its first home and tends to be retired, especially if annual I.T budgets are involved. After which it usually gets re-purposed into smaller businesses or SOHO, but if its proprietary, less people are interested in re-using it as it can be a pain and likely leads to said product having a shorter overall life.

 

Im sure Dell and like companies adhere to the various green laws, which is great, but it's a backtrack to take a "Standard" and tweak it. Just seems silly.

[schuck6566]

2 minutes ago, ENTERPRISE said:

That was a good read. However whichever way you dress it, whether Enterprise or Consumer technology, Dell are still creating a product component that does not need to be proprietary. Whichever way its cut, they are creating a fringe product which is harder to service. Will businesses with Enterprise class gear want additional freedoms when it comes to replacement parts, from experience I can say yes. Remember that not all Enterprise gear is sitting in fortune 500 basements where they can afford to throw money at extended warranties and support and afford to pay the "proprietary" tax so to speak. Even if you can throw money at it, that does not mean it gives Dell a greenlight to create proprietary gear. 

 

Going further from this, Enterprise gear ALWAYS finds it's way down the ladder to your average joe consumers. This is AWESOME as lt for the most part can be readily re-used/repurposed by anyone, rather than it being dumped. Anything that is proprietary tends to have a short life. Enterprise gear does not stay in service for a long time in its first home and tends to be retired, especially if annual I.T budgets are involved. After which it usually gets re-purposed into smaller businesses or SOHO, but if its proprietary, less people are interested in re-using it as it can be a pain and likely leads to said product having a shorter overall life.

 

Im sure Dell and like companies adhere to the various green laws, which is great, but it's a backtrack to take a "Standard" and tweak it. Just seems silly.

Many people first computers have been refurbished comps off of company lease. I wonder how that will work in the future now that it's getting harder and harder to refurbish them? Want to add memory?Ooops! can't,it's oem specific! Want to add a video card? Ooops! The PSU doesn't have enough power and it's OEM specific so it can't be upgraded!  The days of getting a system off lease and upgrading it are coming to an end.... And it's not just Dell, HP has been doing it with the PSU's also.

[Diffident]

Does it really matter?  The people that buy Dell's don't upgrade anyway, they're bought by people like my boss that asks me if he should delete old documents so they don't "fill up the memory".

[UltraMega]

I think the argument that this is better than soldering on the ram is a sound argument. Better to have something be replaceable even if it has to use a proprietary slot to save space. 

 

When Apple does this it doesn't save any space, it just makes things harder for consumers. 

[Darkpriest667]

18 hours ago, UltraMega said:

I think the argument that this is better than soldering on the ram is a sound argument. Better to have something be replaceable even if it has to use a proprietary slot to save space. 

 

When Apple does this it doesn't save any space, it just makes things harder for consumers. 

 

They're doing it to meet specific requirements in multiple jurisdictions. They'd use a non-proprietary form factor on things like Motherboards and power supplies but they were burned in large numbers on the consumer/client side by customers replacing parts themselves, breaking or damaging the system, and then claiming warranty service. It happened enough that Dell began designing it's parts the way it does now. I believe the RAM thing is the same thing.  I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure both with RAM and SSDs this has been happening in numbers enough that the design engineers have gone back to the drawing board to figure out how to stop it.

 

Consumers buy their own ram or SSD and plug it in.. it draws higher amperage and voltage than the board and slot were manufactured for, it kills the board, customer claims warranty. It costs millions a year. When your margins are as thin as they are. They have to stop that behavior, the only way is to make stuff proprietary or soldered to the board.   

Why is the amperage and voltage throughput so low and tight? Ask regulators in states like California. They're all 80+ gold or higher with most being 80+ platinum or titanium.  Steve did admit that the PSU in the G5000 (which is a low end consumer gaming system) was well above average in the PSU categories except in ripple which it was average.  The business class and enterprise class systems are even better and would easily beat out almost anything we buy with the exception of some really high end Corsair and Seasonics.  Most of us would probably get out of customizing our systems if we had to meet the same regulatory requirements. This is why the new NVIDIA 12 pin and 4000 RTX TDP rumors are so funny to me. The 3090ti already can't be put in the gaming systems OEMs ship out legally to like 5 states in the US and parts of the EU. Now they want the xx80 and the 78xx (for AMD) of the next gen to push 600 Watts? insert "yeah ok" meme gif here. 

[Darkpriest667]

Second post -- Steve has a tear down of the Alienware R13. He's not wrong about most of what's said here.   Remember, Alienware is consumer.
 

 

[UltraMega]

2 hours ago, Darkpriest667 said:

 

They're doing it to meet specific requirements in multiple jurisdictions. They'd use a non-proprietary form factor on things like Motherboards and power supplies but they were burned in large numbers on the consumer/client side by customers replacing parts themselves, breaking or damaging the system, and then claiming warranty service. It happened enough that Dell began designing it's parts the way it does now. I believe the RAM thing is the same thing.  I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure both with RAM and SSDs this has been happening in numbers enough that the design engineers have gone back to the drawing board to figure out how to stop it.

 

Consumers buy their own ram or SSD and plug it in.. it draws higher amperage and voltage than the board and slot were manufactured for, it kills the board, customer claims warranty. It costs millions a year. When your margins are as thin as they are. They have to stop that behavior, the only way is to make stuff proprietary or soldered to the board.   

Why is the amperage and voltage throughput so low and tight? Ask regulators in states like California. They're all 80+ gold or higher with most being 80+ platinum or titanium.  Steve did admit that the PSU in the G5000 (which is a low end consumer gaming system) was well above average in the PSU categories except in ripple which it was average.  The business class and enterprise class systems are even better and would easily beat out almost anything we buy with the exception of some really high end Corsair and Seasonics.  Most of us would probably get out of customizing our systems if we had to meet the same regulatory requirements. This is why the new NVIDIA 12 pin and 4000 RTX TDP rumors are so funny to me. The 3090ti already can't be put in the gaming systems OEMs ship out legally to like 5 states in the US and parts of the EU. Now they want the xx80 and the 78xx (for AMD) of the next gen to push 600 Watts? insert "yeah ok" meme gif here. 

If Dell is making motherboards that can't handle normal ram and SSDs being plugged in, then Dell has much bigger problems. 

[Darkpriest667]

4 hours ago, UltraMega said:

If Dell is making motherboards that can't handle normal ram and SSDs being plugged in, then Dell has much bigger problems. 

 

Hey, vote in different elected representatives is all I can say. They make laws that require voltage and amperage requirements that you can't meet with standard ATX motherboards and 1.5V Memory (plus all the other components.) Like i said in my earlier post. If you think you can do better please design one and send it to [email protected] LOL

 

They can make boards that handle it, the problem is those violate legalities in certain large jurisdictions (California and most of the EU) as an OEM system manufacturer. 

[Papusan]

9 hours ago, Darkpriest667 said:

Second post -- Steve has a tear down of the Alienware R13. He's not wrong about most of what's said here.   Remember, Alienware is consumer.
 

 

What a e-waste! Damn the customers that let them continue with this.

 

It doesn't matter if its their laptops or desktops. Everything that being thrown out from their factories is e-waste

Edited April 25, 2022 by Papusan

[UltraMega]

6 hours ago, Darkpriest667 said:

 

Hey, vote in different elected representatives is all I can say. They make laws that require voltage and amperage requirements that you can't meet with standard ATX motherboards and 1.5V Memory (plus all the other components.) Like i said in my earlier post. If you think you can do better please design one and send it to [email protected] LOL

 

They can make boards that handle it, the problem is those violate legalities in certain large jurisdictions (California and most of the EU) as an OEM system manufacturer. 

I don't know enough about the technical aspects of what you're claiming to debate it, but I have a hard time believing Dell is doing this because it can't handle energy requirements in California. California is strict, but it's also Silicone Valley. The regulations made here tend to more or less become standard eventually anyway. 

 

It seems like it would be easier to just integrate the ram if it had to be that specific, or even if they just wanted to make repairs harder they could integrate the ram and just blame CA regulations. 

[bonami2]

New update.  Sodimm interposer can be used over the new design on some future dell product

 

And they want to replace all sodimm with this.

 

Dell defends its controversial new laptop memory | PCWorld

WWW.PCWORLD.COM

---

Dell's new CAMM memory design might actually be a good thing for the PC industry.

 

Edited April 26, 2022 by bonami2

[Darkpriest667]

23 hours ago, bonami2 said:

New update.  Sodimm interposer can be used over the new design on some future dell product

 

And they want to replace all sodimm with this.

 

Dell defends its controversial new laptop memory | PCWorld

WWW.PCWORLD.COM

---

Dell's new CAMM memory design might actually be a good thing for the PC industry.

 

 

 

The reasoning is the bandwidth/throughput of SODIMM is much smaller than CAMM. they don't want it to be proprietary. They'd like for it to be adopted as the industry standard in notebooks and mobile systems.