Motherboard yield report.

shop deals on amazon
xelexo
Advertise with us
Shop deals on ebay
Gold Refining Forum

Help Support Gold Refining Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Z

zzz

Well-known member
Joined
Sep 29, 2012
Messages
60
Hi everyone.
I've recently termined a little specific test on 16 of latest type of mixed brand motherboard (asus, gigabyte, asrock for cpu without pin) and performed gold extracting from every single plated pins and chip.
Collected around 195 grams of mixed chip that give me a little button of exactly 0,5 grams of pure gold (i think with a lost of 0,05 grams for gold in crucible and other things);
the gold of plated pin is lost in the sulfuric...two day of waiting to settle and nothing is appeared (the sulfuric was a little dirty), so i lost sight of.

Regards.
 
16 modern motherboards is roughly 16 pounds. Boardsort currently pays $2.15 per pound for mixed small socket motherboards, or +/- $34.40 for 16 boards.

You got .55 grams (including what you think you lost) from them which, at current spot value of $1642.00 per ounce of gold, is $29.03 worth of gold from processing them.

It still looks like a good idea to "cherry pick" the best stuff for yourself and sell the rest. Take the money and buy gold.
 
It was only a test. I've lost the gold of pin, i think could be almost another 0.5 grams. The weight of motherboards lot weight exactly 10.2 kilos.
 
zzz said:
It was only a test. I've lost the gold of pin, i think could be almost another 0.5 grams. The weight of motherboards lot weight exactly 10.2 kilos.
Click to expand...

How did you process all this? It sounds like you used the sulfuric cell?

Jim
 
zzz,

Your location doesn't show but, since you're using kilos rather than pounds, I assume you're probably not in the U.S. and Boardsort wouldn't be a viable option for you anyhow.

I've been curious as to what our recoverable yields might be. I've heard that, although they have less gold, the "China" boards have more palladium which makes up for it in value.

Are you planning to recover any metals besides the gold?
 
Hello zzz

Not trying to deminish your test results, but in order to truly assay the value of any board for all its worth (all metals content), one would need to:
Manually remove ferrous parts (if present)
incinirate
seperate ashes from metallic parts
crush and mix ashes with flux and collector
Smelt the ashes (all metallic parts placed also at the bottom of the crucible)
xrf the resulting bar or process it for PM's

I have recently finished building a gas furnace and will probably preform many assays for boards, hopefully i could share some of the results here as well.
gas furnace.JPG
 
Yes Geo

I decided to use wool (rated for 1250C/2282F) instead of refractory casting... pure headache if you ask me...
Two layers which amounts to 2 inches.
 
Sam

Have you ever used a rigidizer on your ceramic fiber? There are some great products that do more like ITC-100 which is very popular with forge users because it's also an infrared reflector. But I use a simple rigidizer in furnace applications where high velocity air erodes the fiber. It works best sprayed on, nothing fancy just a garden sprayer. However for small stuff a brush works fine. I would be happy to send you a few ounces to try if you're interested send me a PM.
Just to be clear for anyone wondering this is not something I sell and the company I work for only sells services so I have no commercial interest in this. Just thinking this might extend the life of your furnace and keep the wool out of the assay/air.

All the Best,
John
 
I know, the secret for recovery metal from information tecnology stuff is to melt everything into furnace with an excess of copper, than do the electrolitic refining of copper and recover the anodic slime for precius metal. Less noble metal go into solfuric solution.
 
jimdoc said:
zzz said:
It was only a test. I've lost the gold of pin, i think could be almost another 0.5 grams. The weight of motherboards lot weight exactly 10.2 kilos.
Click to expand...

How did you process all this? It sounds like you used the sulfuric cell?

Jim
Click to expand...
Yes, i used sulfuric cell to strip pin.
 
gold4mike said:
zzz,

Your location doesn't show but, since you're using kilos rather than pounds, I assume you're probably not in the U.S. and Boardsort wouldn't be a viable option for you anyhow.

I've been curious as to what our recoverable yields might be. I've heard that, although they have less gold, the "China" boards have more palladium which makes up for it in value.

Are you planning to recover any metals besides the gold?
Click to expand...

Infact i'm from Europe. Right now i'm not interested to other metal than gold and pgm. In future i'll maybe recover everything.
 
zzz that's very interesting and thanks for sharing, I don't think many people here have done what you have! You didn't recover any gold bonding wires from your chips, did you?

I wonder how much you had on the pins too. You might try diluting your sulfuric to see if your gold sinks, and check it with stannous too in case there was contamination in your sulfuric that dissolved any of your gold. If it still doesn't settle, or if stannous tests reveals dissolved gold, I would dissolve all of the gold by adding some salt to your diluted sulfuric acid and then a wee bit of nitric. Filter the solution, cement it out and then refine your gold and weight it.
Just my idea on how to work this, any comments from anybody?
 
skippy said:
zzz that's very interesting and thanks for sharing, I don't think many people here have done what you have! You didn't recover any gold bonding wires from your chips, did you?

I wonder how much you had on the pins too. You might try diluting your sulfuric to see if your gold sinks, and check it with stannous too in case there was contamination in your sulfuric that dissolved any of your gold. If it still doesn't settle, or if stannous tests reveals dissolved gold, I would dissolve all of the gold by adding some salt to your diluted sulfuric acid and then a wee bit of nitric. Filter the solution, cement it out and then refine your gold and weight it.
Just my idea on how to work this, any comments from anybody?
Click to expand...

That half a gram he reported was from IC chips and from amount of chips he collected result is pretty much in line with cca 2g+/kilogram of mixed IC chips.
There may be some additional value in resistors and monolithic capacitors.
 
Yes, the yield is only from mixed chips. I'm trying to recover the gold from the sulfuric, i've already diluite it, the first part is negative and full of a dark grey sponge that i think is some base metal persulfate (insoluble in almost nothing, also ar), now i have another diluite part that i left settle for all day...now i'm going to check.
 
No gold also in secondo part. I think that the quantity of gold was so little that can not be recovered with these circumstances (dirty sulfuric).
Regards.
 
Hi gentlemen,
Merry Christmas everyone! :)

Regarding the yield of motherboards, below is a paragraph from a chinese research paper. read carefully for the numbers bug me all the time here and can't be right.

"In general, waste PCBs contain approximately 30% metals and
70% nonmetals. The typical metals in PCBs consist of copper (20%),
iron (8%), tin (4%), nickel (2%), lead (2%), zinc (1%), silver (0.2%),
gold (0.1%), and palladium (0.005%). The purity of precious metals in waste PCBs is more than 10 times higher than that of rich-content minerals."
Click to expand...

This would mean that there would be typically 1 KG of Au in a MT of PCBA scrap!

What can the ones with commercial experience tell us please? I think, this must be way, way off. Maybe 1/10 of this or even less?
As you can see they do not even provide details on the board grade used for the tests to get these numbers. :roll:
 
0.1% is about right from my experience. individual components yield different totals but given the overall weight of a motherboard,it sounds right. of coarse you would have to include the CPU with the motherboard.
 
Geo, doesn't that sound somehow too good to be true? Ok, here some maths on this.

Assumptions:
1 motherboard incl CPU (roughly 30-50g average, 450g for board taken from above) = 500g
1MT therefore around 2000 boards with CPUs (let's be generous on the estimate here, not a scientific paper, just trying to create a guideline somehow)
1 CPU average Au content = 0,6g
2000 x 0,6g = 1,2Kg Au
This would be already 20% over 0,1% (1,0Kg) of 1MT :arrow: :?:

Not to mention the 20% out of thin air, where is space here for the Au of bridges, ICs, connectors, card slot pins, etc?

Got lost somewhere on the way. No matter how much i turn and tweak it, i can't get the round hog through the square hole here...

EDIT:
I see my mistake! God, that would be the greatest find ever... assumed average for one CPU is not 0,6g but 0,06g!

Hence, even if the CPUs would have an average of 0,12g, there would be lots of Au space left to get the one Kg. :idea:
Let's assume therefore the 0,12g and we would end up with 240g Au from CPUs and would still have 760g Au left from the boards themselves.

...

Sounds still very, very high to me...
 

Latest posts

Back
Top