[BPI-R4] Successfully upgraded 8GB RAM on BPI-R4

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4(MT7988)
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Please write what memory chips you used. And please show me a photo with the new chips. Thank you in advance!

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Now he has updated the pictures, you can take a look.

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I can’t see all signs clearly. Can I take a photo in normal quality? Or finally write what kind of chips were used, is it really that difficult?

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bz Can you see clearly?

1 Like
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Perfect! Thanks a lot!

H5ANBG6NAM RXNC BGA96 4G

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Has anyone looked into overclocking the SDRAM on R4 ? It seems locked at 3200 from my brief check. Worth digging down the rabbit hole?

Edit: I think it’s near impossible to tweak the timings. Happy to be proved wrong.

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As an aside, stumbled on this while doing research.

8GB Raspberry Pi 5 has slightly less measured bandwidth than 4GB RPi 5 :point_right: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=369585&sid=41232f7554f75cff05c377638a393a1f&start=25

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Is it really 4GB? As per specification I see 32G? :confused:

I see in such a case this chip could be also used: K4ABG165WA-MCWE

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Pretty sure those are 32 Gigabit chips, so you have to divide by eight which gives you the 4GB.

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Found this video

1 Like
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Yes you may can do this in this way … but it is also possible to be a bit more “careful”:

→ backside heating with hot plate (120°C)

→ covering other parts on top side with aluminium foil

→ slow cooling after soldering

→ right choice of flux and soldering paste

But in general → this is the way :+1:

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Might be interesting to poll if there are enough people willing to pay for a 8GB variant to make possible to set up a production line instead of trying their luck with flux&heat gun

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More Docker Containers :slight_smile:

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P.S i find this awesome. Maybe they will release a small batch of 8GB Boards if there is enough demand for it. They could even got for a Pre-Order round to not produce too many.

2 Likes
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I have completed all step, but my R4 still detect as 4GB. Do I miss something?

First, replace two H5ANBG6NAM. Second, remove RDA and replace RDB/RDC with 240R. Third, use BPI-R4-bsp-6.1 to mod BL2; compile ATF and write to emmc.

When I completed all step, the TTL output shows that my R4 still detect as 4GB.

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Now that OpenWRT mainline support is almost sorted hopefully they would have time to consider it.

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需要修改atf 编译bl2.img 刷一下bl2

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shared by liujie: bl2 8g.rar (582.4 KB)

Need to modify atf compile bl2.img and flash bl2

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English: Need to modify atf compile bl2.img flash bl2

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With wwwing’s bl2 files, my R4 finally detect all 8GB Ram.

Thanks for liu_jie’s tutorial and wwwing’s bl2 img.

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@wwwing have you done same change like above (add 4096 to AVAIL_DRAM_SIZE) or anything else?

Does the change have any impact on non 8g boards? If not (as i expect) it could be added to official mtk atf,my version and openwrt.

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After comparing the two TTL outputs, I found the possible reason why the bl2 I compiled did not detect as 8GB.

There is an obvious difference between the two TTL output: DDR4 4BG Mode; after checking some atf compile instructions, I found that if you want to enable the DDR4 4BG MODE, you need to add DDR4_4BG_MODE=1 option to the compile command.

I use default build.sh to compile atf and the command in Makefile is:

$(Q)$(MAKE) --jobserver-fds=3,4 -j -C atf-mt BUILD_BASE=./build_emmc CROSS_COMPILE=$(U_CROSS_COMPILE) PLAT=mt7988 BUILD_STRING="BPI-R4 v2023-10-13-0ea67d76-1 (mt7988-emmc-ddr4)" MKIMAGE=${PWD}/atf-mt/tools/mkimage BOOT_DEVICE=emmc USE_MKIMAGE=1 BOARD_BGA=1 HAVE_DRAM_OBJ_FILE=yes DRAM_USE_COMB=1 all

The command does not include the DDR4_4BG_MODE=1 option.

I think that’s why it has no effect even though I’ve modified dram-configs.mk and recompiled.