Computer Memory sticks, what's in them that makes them so $$

The person I sell my scrap circuit boards to pays around $5.00 a pound for memory, even if the edges do NOT have gold on them. Does anyone know why the are more than twice as valuable as circuit boards? The IC's do not seem to have any extra gold in them?

Steve,

He may be reselling the older memory by the stick.

If he's refining them them maybe he's getting PGMs from the monolthics.

I'm sitting on several hundred pounds of them (gold edges) and nearly 50 pounds of tin edged ones. I've never digested an entire stick to determine if they are high in PGMs or gold. I usually cut the fingers off and sell the remaining cards for as much as I can get.

Do you know what he pays for memory sticks without any fingers? That could give you a clue as to what he's doing with them. If he only wants whole sticks, he's most likely reselling them for use in old computers.

Steve

Does anyone know what metals are in the silver edged memory sticks?
I'm getting a couple bucks per pound for them. I know they are not being reused in old machines. What warrants this? It's no mystery with the gold edged sticks.

Several years back when one of the big resin factories in Japan burned down, the price of memory spiked for a year or more. There was a period there when several companies were advertising for buying used memory. I used to occasionally sell small amounts of used memory I removed from doing upgrades to a couple of them for decent prices. Working memory could be tested and resold domestically, or to third world markets. Or the chips could be remounted on more popular module types in some cases.

The memory chips themselves aren't worth any more than other chips. Typically though a bad SIMM or DIMM would only have one chip that was actually bad. So they were cheap to repair, and could be resold at a hefty profit. Much more than the amount of gold on the edge was worth. I imagine that's still the case.

macfixer01