# ram yeild



## zarkava (Apr 18, 2011)

Could any one tell me how much gold recover from one kg mix ram and it is worth to buy 1 kg ram for 30 $ usd .


thank you


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## shyknee (Apr 18, 2011)

:lol: :lol: this question has been answered ,what feels like a million times. :lol: :lol: 

Try reading or seaching just a little bit and you shall find. :lol: :lol:

welcome to the forum .


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## zarkava (Apr 18, 2011)

i couldn't find that answer i just want to know it worth to buy 1 kg for 30 $ usd plzzz help 

thank you


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## Barren Realms 007 (Apr 18, 2011)

That is a slightly high price to pay.


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## Claudie (Apr 18, 2011)

Barren Realms 007 said:


> That is a slightly high price to pay.




Wouldn't it depend on what he wants it for? :|


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## zarkava (Apr 18, 2011)

i want to recover gold


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## zarkava (Apr 18, 2011)

how much gold come in one ram ??? i have bulk of ram and cpu


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## jimdoc (Apr 18, 2011)

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=96&p=92680&hilit=Memory+Yield#p92680


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## Barren Realms 007 (Apr 18, 2011)

Claudie said:


> Barren Realms 007 said:
> 
> 
> > That is a slightly high price to pay.
> ...



Yes it would and he answered that in the post below yours.


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## Claudie (Apr 18, 2011)

That's about 2 Lbs of RAM. He should be able to come out okay on it as long as he isn't looking to make a great profit. It would be an investment to learn with. :|


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## zarkava (Apr 18, 2011)

finally i bought 100 ram for 40 rs(pakistani rupees ) each .

now what i have to do . i mean could somedoby give me list of stuff to recover gold .


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## Barren Realms 007 (Apr 18, 2011)

zarkava said:


> finally i bought 100 ram for 40 rs(pakistani rupees ) each .
> 
> now what i have to do . i mean could somedoby give me list of stuff to recover gold .



Do a seach using finger's, Acid/peroxide and you will find your answers.


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## zarkava (Apr 18, 2011)

thanks


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## zarkava (Apr 18, 2011)

what should i buy first . do i need any equipment ?


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## jimdoc (Apr 18, 2011)

zarkava said:


> what should i buy first . do i need any equipment ?



What you should do first is calm down, and read the forum first. You only have to post a question once for it to be seen and answered. You can go back to your question in the other topic and hit the X in the bottom corner.
(Now the X will be gone, since someone answered your question, but try to keep all questions and answers in one thread from now on. It makes things easier for everybody)

Its all here on the forum, and has been gone over so many times, that you will find what you need to know by searching. Read Hoke's book. And most of all have patience, don't even start any process until you have read about it and taken notes. Also understand all the dangers of what you will be dealing with, and the fumes.

Jim


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## goldenchild (Apr 18, 2011)

shyknee said:


> :lol: :lol: this question has been answered ,what feels like a million times. :lol: :lol:
> 
> Try reading or seaching just a little bit and you shall find. :lol: :lol:
> 
> welcome to the forum .



Expect a million more questions :| Gold is at an all time high. I seem to be getting a few subscriptions on my youtube channel daily. Unfortunately, people always want the quick and easy.


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## patnor1011 (Apr 18, 2011)

Claudie said:


> That's about 2 Lbs of RAM. He should be able to come out okay on it as long as he isn't looking to make a great profit. It would be an investment to learn with. :|



He will not come out OK.
1 kilogram of mixed RAM is anything from 40 to 100 pieces /they weight from 10 to 25gram each/
So we talk about 40 to 100g of close cut fingers. He may pull out 0.1 to 0.4g from fingers. 
If he process chips too - even with crude method as we seen on youtube with guy grinding them with mortar and pestle and panning - he got 3g of not refined gold colored powder of questionable karat or composition from 800 chips - we can consider it as urban legend as nobody from here did the same experiment, but hey lets believe this for this moment.../ In his 40-100 pieces he may have 8-16 chips on each so it is from 320-640 or 800-1600. Let take average so we talk 480 to 1200 chips so he may actually get more gold out of chips than from fingers - it depend what type of RAM is he processing and if it all was really gold - on that youtube video. 1.5 to 4g

My conclusion is he is going to lose money on this one as return will not cover purchase, use of acids and in case of processing chips again work - you have to get them crushed, gas for incineration and chemicals for refining.

He will not lose a lot and certainly it will be gain if he will look at it as a learning as you go. It may be nice investment to find out what his ability is and at the end of the day he will know how much he can pay as it all depend on how much is he able to recover. Now he need to take few weeks off and spend them studying.


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## Anonymous (Apr 18, 2011)

patnor1011 said:


> He will not come out OK.


Agreed......


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## Claudie (Apr 18, 2011)

patnor1011 said:


> Claudie said:
> 
> 
> > That's about 2 Lbs of RAM. He should be able to come out okay on it as long as he isn't looking to make a great profit. It would be an investment to learn with. :|
> ...




If all he is after is some gold and a learning experience on how to recover & refine it from the RAM, he should be okay. I don't see a great deal of cost on his part. Like I said, he isn't going to see a great profit, and like you said, it does matter what kind of RAM he is working with. He may not get enough gold to even see. If he is planning on buying this RAM and making enough profit from it to take the week off of work, that would be a bad decision on his part. Someone has started a rumor that there is a gold mine in every old computer and with the price of gold ever rising, people are eager to believe that and want their piece of the pie. I think that would partially explain the value of E-Bay gold.


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## Acid_Bath76 (Apr 21, 2011)

Claudie said:


> patnor1011 said:
> 
> 
> > Claudie said:
> ...




No kidding, It makes me chuckle when I see bidders throwing $20 for a pound of ram, and then another $10 in shipping. I can't imagine there being $30 worth of gold in a pound of RAM. Even if there was, you're looking at the time and additional money to refine it. Hopefully, the bubble will burst soon. Until then, I'm keeping my eyes out for other places to scrounge my treasure. Thrift stores have been pretty good to me lately, found some good sterling silverware and the odd pair of broken PM plated reading glasses for .25 to a dollar. Can't beat that right?


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## goldenchild (Apr 21, 2011)

Acid_Bath76 said:


> No kidding, It makes me chuckle when I see bidders throwing $20 for a pound of ram, and then another $10 in shipping. I can't imagine there being $30 worth of gold in a pound of RAM. Even if there was, you're looking at the time and additional money to refine it. Hopefully, the bubble will burst soon.



I think it's these types of transactions that make the people coming on the forum asking for a-z refining particularly annoying. They are the ones making it nearly impossible to win auctions at a good price. eBay used to be a decent place to get scrap. Now it's just madness.


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## zarkava (Apr 27, 2011)

patnor1011 said:


> Claudie said:
> 
> 
> > That's about 2 Lbs of RAM. He should be able to come out okay on it as long as he isn't looking to make a great profit. It would be an investment to learn with. :|
> ...



what about pgms ??? i also got 2% pgms aint ??


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## Claudie (Apr 27, 2011)

patnor is right. You won't make any money on this lot, but you can gain some experience. If you're already out the money for the purchase, use it to learn with. You can get some gold and an education at the same time. Many people out there spend more than $30 on a useless "Get Gold From Computers" DVD or book and end up with nothing to show for their money. Use the information on this site and you will be far ahead. Experience may not always be the best teacher, but it is the most effective.... :|


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## patnor1011 (Apr 27, 2011)

zarkava said:


> patnor1011 said:
> 
> 
> > Claudie said:
> ...



No.
What you got is about 1 gram of monolithics on every ram stick. When you finish taking them off you weight them and you may have Pd - 1-2% of their weight.
So in theory you need 100 RAM sticks to have 100g of capacitors and you may have 1g Pd in them.


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## dtectr (Apr 27, 2011)

And PGMs would need to be processed & refined, as well. Believe it or not, the gold is the easiest to recover, but additional steps, perhaps chemicals - it isn't something you can take a list of A-Z steps & process away. 

This is why you'll see some, but not all, refiners here focus on a speciality - Gold, silver, the platinum group, etc. 

If you just want to _give_ somebody $30 [comment deleted before posting by author]. 

Good luck.


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## arthur kierski (May 7, 2011)

i got by experiments some information on gold yeild in chips from memory sticks that i want to pass to the forum members----------
i took 2,5 kilos of memory sticks and from them i obtained exactly 1kilo of chips
from the chips obtained i did my usual extracting method(incineration and so on) and obtained--1gram of gold------and some silver(did not measured it)

conclusion: 1kilo of mixed memory sticks contains 400grams of chips and 0,4grams of gold and some silver------27grams of smd(aprox 0,3grams of pd)


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## Marcel (Feb 18, 2012)

This yield is very hard tp predict.
The result depends on the type of chip, its date of production and the manufacturer.
Micron f.i. today uses Pd or Au bondwires..
The more pins a chip has, the more and the longer are the connection bond wires. Just today I researched one chip, because there is an auction on
18.000 ICs Motorola MC14053BCP. (Dont know if all can see that:
http://www.ebay.de/itm/200607574579?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1438.l2649
Well, this is no DRAM it is a analog switch and even in DIP but it also has to be interconnected.
The amount of gold in this 16 Pin DIP IC is 0.36 mg/piece, which results in 6480 mg or 6,48g for the whole batch of 18000 chips ! (source is mfr. datasheet). Would you have guessed it? No good deal...
Btw. one chip weights 1g so the whole shipment is 18Kg.
If you have mixed chips it is impossible to predict the outcome. It will vary from batch to batch. Flatter chips with many pins are more likely to yield better - if they contain any gold at all!
And no, there is no gold in those ICs apart from the bond wires.
The best gold containing chips in the PC area are the chipsets, FBGAs and other large ICs on motherboards VGA cards or controllers. 
In a modern SDRAM chip I estimate the gold content around 0,1 mg/chip. Which brings us back to a rough 0,1% ratio of total weight vs gold(-wires) - if there is any gold at all.
To test I use a small, very cheap dremel tool (engraver) and open the chip in the main area and simply look inside if there is gold.


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## patnor1011 (Feb 18, 2012)

I have opened many thousands of them and I found a lot of them with gold plating on various places, not only bonding wires. 8)


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## Marcel (Feb 18, 2012)

patnor1011 said:


> I have opened many thousands of them and I found a lot of them with gold plating on various places, not only bonding wires. 8)


Are we still talking about SDRAM? or in general? Of course there is gold in leadframes of many other chips.


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## samuel-a (Feb 19, 2012)

Marcel said:


> This yield is very hard tp predict.
> The result depends on the type of chip, its date of production and the manufacturer.
> Micron f.i. today uses Pd or Au bondwires..
> The more pins a chip has, the more and the longer are the connection bond wires. Just today I researched one chip, because there is an auction on
> ...



I like this guy :mrgreen:


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## trashmaster (Feb 23, 2012)

Marcel welcome to the forum;;; 

What part of Germany are you from ??? I lived in Giessen for about 17-18 years ..  

I can speak more german than i can type.


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## trashmaster (Feb 23, 2012)

Sam check his profile '' :lol: We need more of this type,,, He can teach us a thing or two or three..


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## Marcel (Feb 23, 2012)

trashmaster said:


> Marcel welcome to the forum;;;
> 
> What part of Germany are you from ??? I lived in Giessen for about 17-18 years ..
> 
> I can speak more german than i can type.



This is getting offtopic... I was born in Giessen and I went to university of applied science there.
It is only 15 minutes from where I live now, and another 15 from Friedberg.
Best times for theses places was when the US army was there. Now all facilities are empty or torn.
But Giessen depot is still there.
You may know this place also. This is how it looks today...





At least something on the topic: The guy using the "crude" method of recovering gold with pure water and mechanical force is a german dude.
I like this way because, there are no chemicals involved and it really is a poor man´s method. I doubt he yield very good, due to his technique but he has prooven it to be possible. Datasheets is one thing, but the ideas people with limited means get are amazing to me. If you asked an engineer on how to recover the gold, he will make it a complicated, costy task.
Btw. he is not saying that he uses RAM chips, just chips in general. So his result is supposingly a mix of various types of chips and I believe, that mostly are large flatpacks.
In teh youtube video he says, "I received them from a friend". Which may mean, he stole them from the junk yard 
Here there is a big fight going on , about the e-waste. Most large garbage collectors, just disasamble the PCs then sell the components over ebay. There are only 3-4 real refiners in Germany, due to the very high standarts when working with chemicals. Also we are not allowed to buy H2O2 33% without large paperwork ( thanks to some matyr idiots who tried to blow up a US facilities with it (TATP) a few years ago).

Btw: I dont want to mess up this thread completly, so if it does not fit in here, please move it to another one:
You can easly crack open any IC at the very right area without burning by simply putting it into the microwave oven for 5-6 seconds.
The area around the die gets cracked and you can very easy remove the epoxy at that very area, without the need to process the leadframes, copper etc. 
I do that sometime sto look inside a chip, but I am not certain wheter the bonding wires survive that. maybe they get melted and could be recovered using AR?
Have not tried that out, maybe never will.
Don´t be afraid on the sparkles and the sound, this will not harm your oven or installation. (You should however not always bake your chips in the same oven where wifey makes the popcorn..). Just get an old microwave for that purpos. Brom and other chemicals will leave the compund and they are very unhealthy! If you get the right point, no odur or fumes will come out. Got to play with the watts and time a bit. Also experiment placing them in water or not.
My camerea´s batteries are down right now, so maybe later I can post some pictures on that.
Its a very fast process to crack them open at the right spot with minimal BM involved. 
And while I am at it: I rember an article from the US magazine "popular science" from the late 1990s. There a guy tried out to melt(smelt?) gold in a microwave oven.
And yes, it is possible.


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## Claudie (Feb 23, 2012)

I would like to see pictures of that.


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## lazersteve (Feb 23, 2012)

I've done a few experiments several years ago using a pressure cooker and water (superheated H2O) to degrade the plastic housings on integrated circuits and met with some success. I also inlcuded several other e-scrap items in the cooker to observe the effects. 

Overall the test went well, until the cooker ran dry of water. At this point the steam ceased and the items inside begin to burn.  

I have not pursued the experiment any further. I feel it is a moderately safe and feasible method to break the epoxy matrix in the plastic chips but you will most likely need a proper high pressure autoclave to get the job done.

I based the experiment on research I did on the effects of supercritical water on organic materials.

Welcome to the forum Marcel !

Steve


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## Marcel (Feb 24, 2012)

Claudie said:


> I would like to see pictures of that.



Picture of what?

The metal melting microwave?

http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2003-09/smelting-microwave
( That is part of the PopSCi article I was talking about. I love this mag, only too expensive for me now.)

and the "inventer of homemade metal microwave melting", David Reid. Maybe ypu shoould invite him here and he can explain it all.

http://home.c2i.net/metaphor/mvpage.html


and if you mean pictures of a microwaved chip - you can do it by youself in a minute. But I will make some and post them, but not today.


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## Claudie (Feb 24, 2012)

Thank you for the links. That helps me understand more. The site shows him handling the insulation bricks, that are cool, with molten metal on the inside. There is something about running a microwave oven with metal inside that is going against what I was taught. I know that many things I was taught are wrong, but it still throws up a red flag in my mind. :|


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## samuel-a (Feb 25, 2012)

trashmaster said:


> Sam check his profile '' :lol: We need more of this type,,, He can teach us a thing or two or three..




YES i agree!
My comment was positive (but might be interpreted otherwise). I think very highly on Marcel and he seems to be very knowledgeable and experienced.
Definitely a welcomed addition to this house.

Welcome aboard Marcel !


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## Marcel (Feb 25, 2012)

Thanks for the warm welcome golddiggers :lol: 
As for me, my eyes open wide reading through this forum, because you have experience and knowledge of the how-to that nobody else has.
You can learn how to design semiconductors and circutry but noone will teach you how to take it apart and refine the PM from them.
In that sense I can only contribute very small, but maybe from a different perspective. The knowledge in this forum is unquie- worldwide I would say. Not even the engineers who work for refiners dig in that deep. Many just pulverize everything then let the material pass throughs everal stations they bought.
But the processes that you have worked out are unbelieveable.
Pd in resistors ? May I confess than I have thrown roughly a million of them away, because i thought they were worthless (they were not RoHS compliant)?
I can only recommend any new user to this forum to read, read, read and read again. There is so much precious information here at bare hand, this is just awesome!


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## Marcel (Feb 25, 2012)

Sorry, 
I just couldnt find one of the major DRAM mfr, who uses goldbonding. (Micron (Al, Pd), Samsung, etc)
Are you sure you find gold bondwires in DRAMs?
Some even use wireless bonding (die-toframe bonding, direct bonding etc)
Some info on bondwire material:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_bonding

I crunched a handful of DRAM ICs tonight and inspected them, but could'nt find any gold in them, neither bondwires nor any other component with gold on it.
But who knows? Maybe some DRAM mfrs do use gold in their production.
Maybe next time dont blend all ICs and check by type to see, if there really is gold in them.
I at least will sell my DRAM ICs at ebay next week.. Maybe soone else has more luck with them.
For me RAM (chip) yield is quite unpredictable, but not high.


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## lazersteve (Feb 25, 2012)

Here's an old thread where we briefly discussed melting metals in the microwave oven complete with a link to a write up on the subject.

Microwave to melt PMs

Steve


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