Average recovery value of a computer

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Mic it's a fair possibility it's not a legend as computer scrap was never valued back in the start of the computer age, all the scrap I was told about came from the manufacturers who didn't care as their profits were huge and the material was considered low grade and not worth the effort to recover by the main stream refiners at the time, I gather it was people similar to the membership of the forum who decided there might be a buck or twos worth of values to reclaim without too much effort. The guy who told me was one of the first to spot the opportunity, he was taking bucket loads of some sort of valve/ diode with fine gold wires trapped in the glass, by the time he came along tons had apparently been dumped in to landfill and that was just one item...so go figure,I'm sure it's the same where ever in the world early e scrap was produced, most as stated was Government funded so it was only our money been dumped!
 
mic said:
kurt said:
(in a very good system)
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kurt said:
this is ALL boards – mother boards, RAM, Cards & HD/CD/DVD boards
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If Kurt is counting every board and component,inside of a vintage computer,then he's pretty close on his figures for gold.A ton of "average" mother boards yield about 6.5 ozt of gold.So he is pretty close.I do not know enough about silver yields to comment on that.
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If there are 6.5 ounces Troy of Gold in 1 Ton of boards, wouldn't that break down to roughly 0.1 gram of Gold per pound of boards? Since an average computer motherboard (from my experience) weighs about 1 pound, wouldn't that figure out to about 0.1 grams of Gold per motherboard. Which would be about $5.20. I only got about 3 hours sleep last night and I haven't been awake very long, maybe my math is off but that's the way I figured it.... :|
 
possible ,but the equation will never work because the actual material the board was made of was much thicker than a mother board.more fiberglass and resin as these were mainframe computers the boards were much larger in dimensions (wider,longer,thicker) there were daughter boards larger than modern mother boards.
 
Claudie said:
Which would be about $5.20
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That is correct.Do not forget we are talking about ALL of the boards within a computer,not only the motherboard.
 
Right. We have the motherboard, any add on cards, the HDD board, floppy board & the boards from the disk drives along with any slot processor present.
 
I just wanted to debate the amount of gold alone processed and refined within a ton of computers. 1st off, 6 oz of Au is just wrong. I have been refining for years. I can tell u that from my research, a ton yields much more than that and nobody cites where they got there info from, yet post it as a fact. Do your own research before taking the word from some guy who throws out a figure like that cuz it's just disappointing for those in this for a hobby or to make real money. You could make much more if you stick with the older computer models, cell phones, and other electronic equipment pre-90s. There is gold in so many parts that are never mentioned in these discussions, so unless u r serious about this, go ahead and take their word for it, otherwise, take apart an old system and see for yourself the gold you see. Dont forget the monitors, inside the hard drives, inside the EEPROMS, inside the peripherals, and then all the fingers, pins, CPUs, etc. Old analog cell phones are loaded with gold plated parts. Collect, sort, and save. I have parted hundreds of older to newer computers, laptops, and an array of other gold plated and other components with precious metals in them. I have over 500 units, all broken down, but still separating boards to this minute. It's fun and kills time. I cant wait to see how much money I will get from the gold alone, thousands of dollars. The silver is got to be in the thousands too. The palladium is up there, but due to the limited amounts, new or old systems, its not that much, but still worth it. The nickel found in the hard drive disks r worth salvaging as are the magnets. There is gold at the end of the read/write arms and even gold in your printer cartridges that HP uses, and some other brands too. Gold is everywhere if u take the time to look. Nice post Kirk. I am not referring to your info by the way. Just fyi.
 
Thomaseames said:
I just wanted to debate the amount of gold alone processed and refined within a ton of computers. 1st off, 6 oz of Au is just wrong. I have been refining for years. I can tell u that from my research, a ton yields much more than that and nobody cites where they got there info from, yet post it as a fact. Do your own research before taking the word from some guy who throws out a figure like that cuz it's just disappointing for those in this for a hobby or to make real money. You could make much more if you stick with the older computer models, cell phones, and other electronic equipment pre-90s. There is gold in so many parts that are never mentioned in these discussions, so unless u r serious about this, go ahead and take their word for it, otherwise, take apart an old system and see for yourself the gold you see. Dont forget the monitors, inside the hard drives, inside the EEPROMS, inside the peripherals, and then all the fingers, pins, CPUs, etc. Old analog cell phones are loaded with gold plated parts. Collect, sort, and save. I have parted hundreds of older to newer computers, laptops, and an array of other gold plated and other components with precious metals in them. I have over 500 units, all broken down, but still separating boards to this minute. It's fun and kills time. I cant wait to see how much money I will get from the gold alone, thousands of dollars. The silver is got to be in the thousands too. The palladium is up there, but due to the limited amounts, new or old systems, its not that much, but still worth it. The nickel found in the hard drive disks r worth salvaging as are the magnets. There is gold at the end of the read/write arms and even gold in your printer cartridges that HP uses, and some other brands too. Gold is everywhere if u take the time to look. Nice post Kirk. I am not referring to your info by the way. Just fyi.
Click to expand...

there is gold in the plain old sea-water also! tons of it!
 
There's nowhere near 6 ounces of gold in a ton of computers. It's a small fraction of that.

Jon
 
I have bunch of computer CPU's mother boards and misc boards that are before 1995 most are 1982 to 1992 several CPU are IBM 686 ceramic. The fingers are alot longer and wider then newer stuff.I have two newer mother boards.the CPU of these have half the pins and way smaller.looking forward this processing them.I don't know if I should separate all the chips pulled of boards and cards or run them all together.if I run them all together it would be close to five gallons or should I pull removable chips and the ones with glass window and run those separate.I know a lot of them are 1992.had several phone computer components that the boards were mostly black chips attached to board with about 4 to 6 chips that were removable and those were 1.25 inches long up to 2 inches
 
steyr223 said:
Now that's a trip,I was just thinking about what Dr. Poe
Had said In another post
I'm surprised nobody caught it
3/4 of an oz of gold per computer (wow)
Dr please step by step procedure,
can the average home lab do this
Thanks steyr223
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That's DEFINITELY a false because a "cheap pc wouldn't be cheap since 3/4 an Oz would be like $1600
 
Pocketsinc said:
That's DEFINITELY a false because a "cheap pc wouldn't be cheap since 3/4 an Oz would be like $1600
Click to expand...
Welcome to us.
This is a then and now question I guess.
At a time a 286 PC cost you the amount of a car at one time, built like a tank and full of PMs.
Today the price is peanuts in comparison and practically free of PMs.
 
It all depends on brand and quality, planned obsolescense does this. Do the test between ugly copper dot oxidized rams and gold dot rams.
 
Ayham Hafez said:
Maybe I will agree with you for the new PC, but regard RAMs it's totally wrong. Cause:

newer RAMs == more gold

this is the rule.
Click to expand...
Where did you find this rule?
What Jon says about e-waste can be considered to be the rule.
He runs through more scrap in a week than I will see my whole life.
 
Yggdrasil said:
Where did you find this rule?
What Jon says about e-waste can be considered to be the rule.
He runs through more scrap in a week than I will see my whole life.
Click to expand...
I did it several times, DDR4&3 recoverable gold much more than SDRAM, DDR1 and DDR2 RAMs
 

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