# 3 questions about cpu's



## Bluebloomer (Sep 14, 2014)

Does anybody have an idea how much gold there might be in an AMD Opteron 939 cpu ? I am refering to just the pins. My guess would be around 0,08 gr Au per cpu with 949 pins but that's just a wild guess.

Google doesn't seem to have any hits regarding Opteron 939 cpu gold content.

And since we are on the subject of CPU's I have a 2 in 1 question:

I have about 150 cpu's, most of them P4, Celeron, Sempron, AMD etc and about 10 ceramics. Some of the P4 have what seems to be gold plating inside the heat spreader. To get to the gold I need to deplate the heatsinks, and get rid of the nickel. Tried a batch with amonia, 1 with vinegar and 1 with bleach but the vinegar didn't do anything, and the bleach also removed the gold plating (or is it even gold?) amonia only stained it black.

So how should I deplate the copper heatspreader, and how do I do it so I can get to the gold plating, unless it is not worth the efford to try and get to the gold plating on the Pentium 4 cpu's..

And as for my other failed experiments; I cleaned up everything, treated, filtered and discarted the waste and I am now only focussing on Hoke's and basic chemistry.


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## Long Shot (Sep 14, 2014)

Blueboomer - I ran into the "plated" heat spreaders as well. In fact these are brazed gold, not plated. There is a post here somewhere where someone tried to recover it. Sorry, I can't remember who, but could probably find it if you really, really want to pursue it. The gist of it was the fellow used a sulphuric cell to remove and recover the braze and his findings, if I remember correctly, was that you would have to recover from 1,000 units to get a gram of Au. As you mentioned, not all of the spreaders have this feature so it would take a lot of scrap to get a 1,000 units and then the processing!! I just through in the towel and cashed mine at the yard for #3 copper.


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## Bluebloomer (Sep 17, 2014)

Thank you Long Shot.

Perhaps I should just forget about those heatspreaders then and focus on the pins themself.

Too bad nobody knows the answer about a guestimate for the Opteron gold content. I just treat those Opterons (green fiber) as all newer green fiber AMD cpu's with a speculated 0,08 gram of Au per CPU.

If I win the auction then I will process the Opterons only to get an idea of the gold content.


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## resabed01 (Sep 17, 2014)

Bloomer,

After much searches and digging I've concluded that in 100g of CPU pins one should expect somewhere near 0.5g of gold on average. My expected yield was gleaned from many posts here and I have no idea if it's accurate or not. I haven't yet processed CPU pins to confirm this so guide yourself accordingly.
I do know that some fiber CPUs have larger pins and some smaller, some more and some less.... and I also know how many grams of pins each type of CPU will yield.
So, for example, 100 brown fiber CPUs will yield xxx grams of pins. From that one could calculate the expected return of Au.

The fiber bases should not be overlooked either. I just finished running in AP a batch of bases from fiber CPUs with the pins removed, pinless fiber CPUs and fiber bases from BGAs. In all I think the batch size was somewhere between 1 to 2 lbs (stupid me never weighed it) and the gold recovered was just over 1 gram.


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## etack (Sep 17, 2014)

Long Shot said:


> Blueboomer - I ran into the "plated" heat spreaders as well. In fact these are brazed gold, not plated. There is a post here somewhere where someone tried to recover it. Sorry, I can't remember who, but could probably find it if you really, really want to pursue it. The gist of it was the fellow used a sulphuric cell to remove and recover the braze and his findings, if I remember correctly, was that you would have to recover from 1,000 units to get a gram of Au. As you mentioned, not all of the spreaders have this feature so it would take a lot of scrap to get a 1,000 units and then the processing!! I just through in the towel and cashed mine at the yard for #3 copper.



They are not gold brazed they are solder with indium. This is the post on it. 

http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=17250

We all wish they were

Eric


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## Bluebloomer (Sep 18, 2014)

@resabed; yes numbers are all over the place, from half a gram per ceramic to 0,02 per P4 cpu so I guess it realy depends on how you approach the process in recovering the gold.
Perhaps the recovery values aren't realy fixed if it all depends on experience and the quality of the acids used ?

@etack: I am not talking about the solder, it's the gold colored square around the soldered chip







Perhaps the "gold" is there to prevent the nickelplated copper from oxidizing after soldering, or to prevent the nickel from discoloring after soldering I have no idea but there is no reason to use gold inside the heatspreader, right ?

Only the Pentium cpu's (Celeron D and P4) with soldered chips have those gold colored squares inside the heatspreader.


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## solar_plasma (Sep 18, 2014)

Those celeron D and pentium4 are a headache to me. Though I only have a hand full of them, since months I wonder how to process them in the best way.

There are plated pins that are loosely soldered to the base. Inside pure indium. Gold plated to the inside of the heat spreader. Nickel plated copper heat spreader glued with something like silicone to the base. I think it would be best first to lay them in HCl before opening. The pins would fall off, solder dissolved. Probably gold plated beneath the solder points(?). Now, they could be opened and treated with new HCl to not to contaminate the pure indium, getting pure indium chloride. The heat spreader could be cleaned from any silicone glue, then go to the sulfuric cell. The bases, if gold plated, would go to the AP together with solder free green bases of BGA's. The solder free pins could be processed in a sulfuric cell or AP.

The HCl-solder-solution would be parted in stannous chloride, lead chloride and silver chloride by solubility methods, then by stoichiometric precipitation of lead sulfate.

Only some thoughts. I am open for discussion. I don't know, if I ever will have enough of those so processing them would make sense.


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## g_axelsson (Sep 18, 2014)

solar_plasma said:


> Probably gold plated beneath the solder points(?).


Probably so, but any gold plate that is soldered on is dissolved instantly when the solder hits it. It is diluted in the solder and released when treating the pins with HCl to dissolve the tin. Maybe as colloidal particles.

I wouldn't treat the CPU:s with HCl before removing the heat spreader, there is a small hole on the top so then I would have to work with CPU:s full of acid... not my kind of fun. :mrgreen: 

The few I have processed I cut around the heat spreader and then broke it off. The pins were removed with old copper chloride (Cu cemented, Sn went into solution) and the heat spreaders treated with HCl to dissolve the indium.

Göran


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## solar_plasma (Sep 18, 2014)

I see. And I forgot, the indium is only at the top, if the silicon die breaks.

After you dissolved the indium, did you see any gold plating left where the indium had been soldered to? Maybe the indium could be used to dissolve gold plating from the heat spreader and maybe even from other tin free material and after accumulating the gold it could easily be recovered by dissolving the indium gold alloy in HCl.


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## Bluebloomer (Sep 19, 2014)

Nice, thank you guys for the additional information. 

I now realize that I must separate the AMD and Intel cpu's and treat them both in a separate process..

Haven't count them yet but I guess there are about 40 plated heatspreaders with the gold plating.

So far I already cracked the cpu's open like clambs, and removed all the monolithic capacitors and the heatspreaders.
I now have about 40 with the gold plating and about 80 mixed AMD / Intel green fiber cpu's (some ceramics, some brown and green older AMD / Intel cpu's
60 more AMD Opteron cpu's are on the way, same as the 1,660 kg of mixed cpu's.

Found out dat 10% HCL removes the nicel plating fast, about 2 hours or so..

Now, since the heatspreaders are taken off, and most of the glue is scraped off what should be the best way to proceed ?

10 % HCL to remove the legs, or the 33% A/P to remove the legs and the gold, or should I just desolder the legs with heat and incinerate the base plates ?

Didn't expect that Intel would make it this hard lol, I also read that Indium is pretty toxic ?

I haven't processed any Intel cpu's yet and they already give me a headache, but since I have so many of them I need to know anything about the best process to deal with these.
I do have battery acid (35%) so after deplating the heatsinks with 10% HCL, I should use the 33% hcl to separate the chip from the heatsink ?


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## solar_plasma (Sep 19, 2014)

I have to do some experiments first, but I believe it is better to keep heatsinks with indium separated from the base, so you get a clean indium chlorid/gold bottle and the other with tin/lead/silverchloride.

If the indium would work well to dissolve gold, I could imagine to solder the whole gold plated areal with it, then dissolving the indium.

Only ideas. Need to try this first.

I think 100 gold plated sinks could yield 0,0002cm x 2,5cm x 2,5cm x 19g/cm3 ...edit: 2,3g/ 100 CPU heat sinks ....if it was 2um gold ...in the best case...please check my calculation, it seems to be high

edit: but at least 0,23g/100 CPU heat sinks


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## g_axelsson (Sep 19, 2014)

All surfaces with gold on that was soldered had lost all visual gold as I remembered. I filtered the solution and the filter ended up in my filter burning heap so I don't know if there was any gold in it.

There was a post about the gold content, someone used a sulfuric cell to deplate the gold from the heat spreaders.

Göran


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## solar_plasma (Sep 19, 2014)

Very important observation! Then I would use a soldering iron and the indium on the heat sink and spread the indium all over the gold before HCl treatment.


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## solar_plasma (Sep 19, 2014)

I have thought back and forth, the solder iron idea is too work intensive. Just dissolve the indium and let the gold particles settle, then syphon the clear indium chloride solution off. The left over plating should go to the sulfuric cell, maybe even one by one using the micro cell setup. Any left over silicone glue should be scraped cleanly off or even incinerated first, it would contaminate the sulfuric with carbon.


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## Bluebloomer (Sep 20, 2014)

That's a lot of work for a little bit of gold. Why does Intel have to complicate things so much lol..

Perhaps I'm better off selling the gold plated heatspreaders on eBay ?

All the suggestions and idea's you guys give me ar for the more advanced scrapper / refiner and since I'm just a Noob it might be a bridge too far...
100 of these heatspreaders will yield about 8 dollar worth of copper assuming all heatspreaders way in at 13 gram (some are 15, or 18) with a copper price at € 5,50 per kg.
It might surely be an interesting journey to attack the heatspreaders like you guys suggest. Perhaps I will sell them for the copper, sell them for the gold plating or just save them for the day I know exactly what and how to recover the gold from them.

So the heatspreaders with the gold plating are out for now, that still leaves me with 4 Lbs of Pentium 4, Celeron D cpu's without the heatspreaders on. What would be the most efficient way to remove the legs and extract the gold ?

1. Using heat to remove the legs and then in an A/P solution ? Or a batch with 10% HCL to remove the legs and then in a fresh A/P solution?
2. The green fiber boards, incinerate and straight in HCL/CL ? Or leave the base intact and also use an A/P solution ?

Seen several ways to deal with big amounts of mestannic acid that will form due to the large amounts of solder, the NaOH method seems to be most obvious ?

I realy apreciate all the input, but dealing with those gold plated lids is above my knowledge for now. So thank you all, but I think it's better to skip that step for a little while...


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## Bluebloomer (Sep 20, 2014)

Offtopic I have 1 more question but I don't want to spam the forum;

I've been stripping some floppy ribbon cables, and some of the floppy and IDE ribbons contain what appears to be brass pins and strips. I just put a few of them in A/P to find out if it was gold or brass, but I think it's neither. The A/P solution turned bright yellow, and the pins and strips (strips of nickel / brass with teeth between the pins) turned reddish like it's copper.

If it was brass the the pins and strips would disintergrate because it's an alloy right? It it was gold, I would see flakes, so what could it be ? The pins are dark yellow like brass, but put in HCL the gold / yellow collor disapeared leaving cupper like material behind. It allmost looks like it's a paint or yellow plated layer of some sort..?


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## solar_plasma (Sep 20, 2014)

> 1. Using heat to remove the legs and then in an A/P solution ? Or a batch with 10% HCL to remove the legs and then in a fresh A/P solution?
> 2. The green fiber boards, incinerate and straight in HCL/CL ? Or leave the base intact and also use an A/P solution ?



Economically, I think it would be best to sell the intact CPU's on ebay. Everything else can only be for an educational purpose. In your ("noob")case you could read absolutely everything about AP (=CuCl2=copper-II-chloride) and then decide, if you want to use it on your pins.

Never try to incinerate PCBs. You would form very nasty, cancerogene, toxic smoke and vapor with organic brom and chlorine compounds, dioxines and phenoles, as far as I understood.

Never go "straight", if you have the choice of first eliminating base metals.

There is nothing worth to recover in the green base (maybe 3% silver in the solder, microtraces of dissolved gold).


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## MarcoP (Sep 20, 2014)

solar_plasma said:


> Any left over silicone glue should be scraped cleanly off or even incinerated first, it would contaminate the sulfuric with carbon.


To complicate things a little more, if the paste it's gray, it could be silver paste.


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## Bluebloomer (Sep 20, 2014)

I'm still learning the basics, and sometimes I still mix up the apropriate terminoly so in that case I consider myself a noob..

Cpu's are not intact, so selling them as a whole is not an option I'm afraid. I realize the P4 yields are low, about 0,02 gr Au per cpu I believe, and that number might even be optimistic.
But, I have to learn the process anyway, so what would be better than to use some low grade cpu's to master the process so I won't mess up the batch with ceramic cpu's in due time.



> Never go "straight", if you have the choice of first eliminating base metals.



That seems like a thing to remember at al times..



> There is nothing worth to recover in the green base (maybe 3% silver in the solder, microtraces of dissolved gold).



Don't want to argue here but in between the monolithic capacitors, there are small gold plated stripes where there is no MLCC. Wouldn't it be viable to recover those traces of silver and gold if you would process them by the hundreds ? If you think it's a waste of time and recources I will drop the subject and regret ever buying the 3 lb of P4/Celeron D batch and will consider it just another rookie mistake..





I have been scraping off the silver paste from hundreds of cpu's at work and home, I will try and process them in a 50/50 nitric bath when I have enough of it. 
Could a dillute acetone solution not take care of the black epoxy, so it will come off and traces could be scraped off easily ?

If I was to remove all the P4 legs, wouldn't it be more practical to dissolve the gold in HCL/CL, filter dry and incinerate the sediment, and re-dissolve it in 50/50 Hno3 and cement with copper ?
I see there are so many ways to deal with certain issues and I just don't want to overcomplicate things anymore then I need to..
It was a big mistake to buy the 1.5 Lb of P4/Celeron D cpu's, I understand that now...


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## g_axelsson (Sep 20, 2014)

Bluebloomer said:


> > There is nothing worth to recover in the green base (maybe 3% silver in the solder, microtraces of dissolved gold).
> 
> 
> 
> Don't want to argue here but in between the monolithic capacitors, there are small gold plated stripes where there is no MLCC. Wouldn't it be viable to recover those traces of silver and gold if you would process them by the hundreds ? If you think it's a waste of time and recources I will drop the subject and regret ever buying the 3 lb of P4/Celeron D batch and will consider it just another rookie mistake..


Technically speaking it isn't gold plate, it's gold flash (< 10 micro inches gold) and at todays gold price that's less than 13 cents per square inch. How many CPU:s do you need for one square inch? You decide if it's worth it or even possible to see the gold after recovery.

It's even worse... a bit of googling (15 seconds) gave


> The IPC ENIG Specification-4522 specifies 120 – 240 micro-inches
> of Ni with 2 – 4 micro-inches of immersion gold.



Göran


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## Bluebloomer (Sep 20, 2014)

Auch that hurt g_axelsson, but it's clear what to do now..

I guess the only option would be to sell the boards with pins attached but without heatsinks, and hope I get at least some of my money back..
So the gold plated lids and the cpu's without the heatsink will go on eBay and I just stay away from any newer Intels from now on..

It's obvious now that pursuing the Pentium 4 / Celeron D process is just not worth the time efford and recources...
Thank you all for contributing, I took notes of all your input and it might come in handy later.

Since nobody seems to know about the AMD Opteron yield I will just take the gamble and hope that it yields indeed the 0,08 gram of gold per cpu.

I will take a picture of the gold colored pins from the IDE/Floppy ribbons and how they look after a day in A/P, perhaps then somebody knows what it is.


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## solar_plasma (Sep 20, 2014)

The pinless CPUs yield even less than the other newer green fibers. Never tried them, but that's what they say everywhere.

If you are looking for good beginner stuff, search for RAM, PCI cards or ceramic CPUs for a price not much higher than the refineries pay. Then you have chances to get the money back you paid for the scrap and the chemicals at least, maybe even for the effort, though don't count on the last one.


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## Bluebloomer (Sep 20, 2014)

Yeah I can imagine that, those pinless cpu's just have little gold dots, my guess is that 1 dot about equals 1 Pentium 4 pin in gold value..

Realy realy realy underestimated those Intel cpu's, My co-workers are all Intel fans and they dislike AMD but if you look at the differences in how they make and produce cpu's then AMD gives me a bigger smile with bigger pins, almost twice the weight in the copper heatspreader (30 gram per cpu as oppose to Intels 13 to 18 gram) and a darker looking gold coating on the pins...

If you compare a P4 and a Sempron for example you would guess that the Sempron is the more expensive one, and the P4 is the cheaper looking one, but in fact it's just the opposite...Weird he ?

Anyway, learned another valuable lesson today haha, don't mess with Intel because they mess with you more..

I'm not in it for the money at all, I am recovering and refining gold and silver (and possibly Pd, Ta and Pt once I finish Hokes) to collect the precious metals for a rainy day or when the European economy collapses due to the malfunction Euro and it's artifical recessions to try and hold the Euro.. Nowadays with all the misery in the world, IS, Ebola, Ukraine crisis, and the finacial disaster from the falling banks that still cause us a great deal of misery (everything in the Netherlands has been 120% more expensive since the Euro in 2001) I think it's just a good idea to have a nice collection of precious metals for when it all comes falling down on us.. Not to mention when the fossile fuel nightmare unfolds or if Russia would no longer supply us with gas due to the santions given by the EU.. 

Whoops sorry didn't mean to give a political statement or anything, just wanted to say why I want to invest in e-scrap and collect those wonderfull metals..


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## Bluebloomer (Sep 20, 2014)

And to come back to your advice solar; I did manage to collect about 5 LB of pins from IDE, Floppy, PCI, and other motherboard pins, about 200 Ram stick, about 150 PCI fingers from misc cards, around 120 keyboards, 80 half stripped motherboards, 20 ceramic and older cpu's, around 100 AMD cpu's, around 10 LB of cellphones and a big pile of oscilator crystals, tantalum caps, monolithic caps and all other big components I yanked off of 60 older PSU's and PC PCB's. I still have to process 40 more harddrives for the pins and chips and I expect to have at least 10 LB of chips when I'm done. 

Got 8 moving boxes full of scrap, parts and boxes filled with parts, it's a chaos sometimes to organize it lol, so I'm reducing every big pile to a smaller pile, and reduce that so it can go into jars and so.
Next weekend I want to start with a sandbath to further depopulate the motherboards and cellphone boards because they alone take up 3 big boxes.

As our "business" gets closed down in january I expect to get another 200 DDR1 ramsticks, and perhaps 50-100 older IDE harddisks and and equal amount of keyboards, and possibly a bunch of old Dell Opliplex systems, ISDN / DSL modems and routers, and even a bunch of 15 inch lcd screens. I need to get it before the vultures at management sell it all to a scrapyard or so..


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## MarcoP (Apr 17, 2015)

Indium in P4s. Supposing one day I'll do it properly and make clean indium chloride, would cementing with copper be ok?

Quick question without studying further, if any caveat please advice and I'll follow up with further readings.

Thanks
Marco


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