# Gold Lids (chips) Yield.



## philddreamer (Apr 30, 2012)

I just finished processing 85 grams of gold chips from 386/486 and the like, and the yield is 6.6 grams of gold.
If my math is right, that's 1 gram of gold per 12.87 grams of gold chips.
Anyone else had a similar yield?

Thanks!

Phil


----------



## ericrm (Apr 30, 2012)

did you process all the chip in the picture?


----------



## philddreamer (Apr 30, 2012)

Hi Eric!
Yes I did, except the little white one on the bottom left. That one is for my collection. 8)


----------



## ericrm (May 1, 2012)

if you process all those cpu ,your already way over you the 85 g you think you have process... 
and to be honest i realy think you made a mistake somewhere because even with 1lbs of cpu and not 85g this is way to high for what i have experienced.
could you plz tell what method your used?


----------



## philddreamer (May 1, 2012)

Eric, you misunderstood; I made no mistake.
I processed 85 grams of gold "chips or lids" that are from cpu's like the ones on the pic, not 85 grams of cpu's. 
When I bought the cpu's on the pic, they weighed close to 2 pounds. (I saved some that I like.) I de-soldered the gold lids from the cpu's on the pic and the gold lids weighed 51 grams. A couple of days later I bought some more cpu's & IC's with gold lids; 34 grams of lids, and I processed ALL the gold lids, a total of 85 grams of gold lids; the yield 6.6 grams of gold.

The cpu's on the pic yielded 4 grams of gold on the first run. I'll do a second run later.

The cpu's I incinerated, (at the same time I took off the lids), then ran thru Poorman's AR. The lids, incinerated; ran thru HCl. Rinsed. Incinerated; ran thru nitirc. Rinsed. Ran thru Poorman's AR.

I hope this helps.

Phil


----------



## ericrm (May 1, 2012)

oh i understand, my mistake
i still find it hard to beleive
did you use smb to drop your gold? 
have you refine it twice?

dont take it as an inuslt or something like that ,im just curious and "incredule"


----------



## philddreamer (May 1, 2012)

I'm not insulted. I just tried to explain with more details.


> did you use smb to drop your gold?


I always drop my gold with SMB. Some day I'll try copperas, though.



> have you refine it twice?


No, I haven't refined twice, but I did rinse properly. I'm recovering gold from e-scrap that I've had laying around for a while, and as soon as I can, I'll process a second time. (I'm taking the refined button to a coin shop that's interested in me refining several hundred ounces of silver scrap. Maybe they'll let me refine their gold scrap, too... :shock: )

What is your expirience with the cpu's? And the gold lids? Maybe we can compare results.

Take care!


----------



## ericrm (May 1, 2012)

i would not considere my experience an "atout" here lol
except for my first try with pentium pro ,that have yielded .28 g each (i know ,i suck :roll: ),i have not keep track of my material and result.
but i have pass several hour here reading post ,and the number you come up with is just too high(but i hope im wrong), remember glondor gold guessing contest .with the best possible material with 9% yield (witch was thin ,fully plated pins), and you end up with 8% with thiker and wider material,that is not plated in fonction to endure wear ...

i hope you are wright ,if somebody here can confirm his yield that would be nice


----------



## nickvc (May 1, 2012)

If I remember correctly GSP has made mention of the lids been attached by a gold braze, that been the case it's possible to get that sort of yield from just the lids, it's not the plating where the value is it's the braze.


----------



## goldsilverpro (May 1, 2012)

The lids are not the chips. The "chip" is the silicon circuit. If you ran only the gold lids, I'm not surprised by your yields. We once ran 1100 pounds of new gold lids and got an ounce per pound. However, with new unused lids, all of the braze is on the lid. When you de-solder the lids from CPU packages, as much as half the braze can be left on the mounting ring of the package and the other half (or, whatever) is on the lid.

In general, the smaller the lids, the higher the yield, per pound. The 1100# of lids I mentioned above were about the size of those on the group of 40 lead side-braze packages in your first photo.

The lids on the large array of smaller 16 or 18 lead packages on the circuit board (2nd photo) should run higher that the larger ones..


----------



## ericrm (May 1, 2012)

g.d ,ho.y fudge
thank to clarify that :mrgreen:


----------



## philddreamer (May 1, 2012)

Eric,my expirience with PPros is a yield of .4 to .5 grams per cpu. 
As I understand, the plating on the lids is much heavier than on pins. 

Nick, I did noticed when I was digesting in AR that there was a thicker material, like little nuggets, that were reacting for a while. Most of the foils digested fairly quick, but not these "nuggets". That was my thought, maybe the solder that collected when a incinerated the lids. 

Chris, thanks for correcting the terminology. I referred to them, at times, as chips because I wasn't sure of the correct terminology; and for sharing you expirience with the yield of the lids.

Thank you gentlemen!

Phil


----------



## glorycloud (May 1, 2012)

I bought a five gallon bucket of chips from a guy for scrap.
I got lucky and sold two of the chips for $180.00. :shock: 

One of them looked like one of yours but it still had the heat sink attached to it.

Not everything should get dunked in nitric boys and girls. 8)


----------



## philddreamer (May 1, 2012)

The person I bought the scrap was not carefull handling the cpu's. They all had bent pins, except for the 387DX; so the rest of them into the pot. 

(I'm still waiting for an offer! 8) )

Phil


----------



## goldsilverpro (May 1, 2012)

philddreamer said:


> The person I bought the scrap was not carefull handling the cpu's. They all had bent pins, except for the 387DX; so the rest of them into the pot.
> 
> (I'm still waiting for an offer! 8) )
> 
> Phil



You can buy pin straighteners. Or, use good tweezers (SS, smooth, no ridges). I once owned a business that re-built reject CPU packages (mostly 40 lead side-brazed, just exactly like those in the 1st photo), for re-use, mainly for Intel and AMD. We ran about 50,000 of them per week. When rejected, they were just thrown together into a container and every single one had bent legs. I had two girls that straightened leads with tweezers all day long.


----------



## lazersteve (May 1, 2012)

Phil,

Have you seen this thread?

486 Lid Yields

My yields were from all 486 cpus and was only 2.4% gold by weight, your was better but from mixed cpus.

I did process the packages and braze separately as seen here:

486 CPU Yields


Great work Phil!!

Steve


----------



## MMFJ (May 1, 2012)

glorycloud said:


> I bought a five gallon bucket of chips from a guy for scrap.
> I got lucky and sold two of the chips for $180.00. :shock:
> 
> One of them looked like one of yours but it still had the heat sink attached to it.
> ...



That chip looks a lot like these Pentium Overdrive chips I got.... I had three of them torn up before thinking.....


----------



## philddreamer (May 1, 2012)

Chris, so as long as the cpu's are not missing pins &/or the pins are not so wayout of shape they could be aceptable!?
I saved 2 IDT340's & straighten the pins on the one & I'll be doing the same on the next one. Thanks!

Thanks Steve! I've learned from the best. 
I've read so many times different expiriences, (good & bad ones), that I decided to go the route mentioned above for processing the lids, turns out is the same as yours. The only difference is that I boiled in HCl to get rid of tin & some iron; then went to boiling in nitric to speed things up; and the lids were ready for AR in 2 days.

Phil


----------



## goldsilverpro (May 1, 2012)

Phil said:


> Chris, so as long as the cpu's are not missing pins &/or the pins are not so wayout of shape they could be aceptable!?
> I saved 2 IDT340's & straighten the pins on the one & I'll be doing the same on the next one. Thanks!



As long as the seal holding the pin to the package isn't cracked or otherwise damaged. If the pins are attached with a glass-to-metal-seal (GTMS), the seal is likely damaged. However, since the purpose of the glass is as an insulator to electrically isolate each lead, GTMSs are only found on metal packages, such as top hat transistor headers or fiber optic and microwave hybrid packages. If attached with a solder or braze, like the leads of the side-braze packages (the ones I worked with), which uses a Ag/Cu braze, they probably aren't damaged. Check for damage with an eye loupe in good lighting.


----------



## Anonymous (May 1, 2012)

MMFJ said:


> That chip looks a lot like these Pentium Overdrive chips I got....


DO NOT process the overdrive chip with the fan attached._Depending on the condition_,you can get many times more from a collector,then you would from the gold content


----------



## glorycloud (May 1, 2012)

With a small phillips head you can take the fan off that one remaining
POD (pentium overdrive) so you can read what it says on top of the chip.

Mine looked like this one with the fan off. 8)


----------



## schomisch (May 2, 2012)

Wow goldsilverpro 1.8m in just gold lids very nice =)) 

~Chris!~


----------



## goldsilverpro (May 2, 2012)

A little about gold plated lids. I don't think I've ever seen a gold plated CPU lid that was attached with anything but 80/20, Au/Sn braze. That doesn't mean they don't exist. The lids are made with a stripe of braze running around the edge of one side. I'm thinking the braze is from .001" - .002" thick, which would make it about 20 to 40 times thicker than the plating. Therefore, much (or, most, in the case of the smaller lids) of the gold value comes from the braze. In my experience, the braze stripe is about the same width on all gold lids. For this reason, smaller lids, which have a higher percentage of their surface area covered, are worth more per pound, assuming equal lid thicknesses. After plotting the data from a few small refining lots of various size lids, a person could probably ball-park predict the value of any gold lid from its area (and the lid thickness).


----------



## Barren Realms 007 (May 2, 2012)

philddreamer said:


> Chris, so as long as the cpu's are not missing pins &/or the pins are not so wayout of shape they could be aceptable!?
> I saved 2 IDT340's & straighten the pins on the one & I'll be doing the same on the next one. Thanks!
> 
> Thanks Steve! I've learned from the best.
> ...



The pins can be bent all the way over and still streightened out. The best thing I found to use was the lid off of a CPU about 1" sq and just start going inline and with patience you will find it is not that hard, just time consuming when you have a lot of them to do.


----------



## philddreamer (May 9, 2012)

Picked up a few more items.

16 of the C2708; some "cans" with golden legs; 3 golden IC's...
I straightened out the legs on the centipedes. 8) 

Phil


----------



## philddreamer (May 11, 2012)

I'll be working on these 45# of boards with lots of pins. I'll post the yield when I'm done. I hope a gram per board! 

Phil


----------



## larryb (Dec 17, 2012)

philddreamer said:


> I'll be working on these 45# of boards with lots of pins. I'll post the yield when I'm done. I hope a gram per board!
> Phil


Any results on these yet.  lb


----------



## philddreamer (Dec 17, 2012)

Sorry. I lost track of the post. Those pins had a yield of 2g + per pound.
Phil


----------

