What parts have gold?

[cd3000]

Over last winter and up to today, I have collected about 60 computers. I am running out of room on my patio and of course it looks terrible.

Anyway, what parts have the gold on them? Is it just the CPU & RAM chips that are worth putting through the recovery process or are the motherboards, Hard Drives, other cards (Video, Modem etc) worth it?

Once the gold is extracted, where is the best place to get paid for it after all of that work? I'm in Canada, near Toronto.

Thank you in advance for your help...

 

[Topher_osAUrus]

Over last winter and up to today, I have collected about 60 computers. I am running out of room on my patio and of course it looks terrible.

Anyway, what parts have the gold on them? Is it just the CPU & RAM chips that are worth putting through the recovery process or are the motherboards, Hard Drives, other cards (Video, Modem etc) worth it?

Once the gold is extracted, where is the best place to get paid for it after all of that work? I'm in Canada, near Toronto.

Thank you in advance for your help...

I can relate to that.. Hell, thats why we moved out to the country :lol:

Whats worth it depends on you.. What you want to go through, and a bunch of other things like lab space, equipment, chemical availability and cost, and time that you can devote to learning (theres a LOT to discover here)

As a beginner, I wish i would have just stuck to easy things like fingers and ceramic cpu's, but even after my trials by fire, i still like this hobby alot.

If you want *every* pm from the boards you would need to get the smd's, pins, monolithic caps, tantalum caps, and others im pmitting by forgetfulness...of course ram, and processors.

Newer computers have less PMs, but are easier to come by.

If you are in a crunch for cash (or to get the wife happy), just tear them down, separate, and sell. If you have a year or more, read here on the forum and start to build up your lab.

This is just my opinion, everyone here has one, but i hope it gets you a bit of clarity to your question.

Toph

 

[kernels]

If I were going to clear up the mess and just keep the best bits, I would keep (in order) RAM (for fingers and chips), PCI/APG cards (for fingers and chips), Hard drives (for Aluminium scrap and chips), cpus (only some, most you find these days have low pms and difficult to process)

steel, copper wire, aluminium heatsinks all go the scap metal guy. I also sold my last 200kg or so of motherboards to the scrap metal guy because he was paying NZ$3/kg for motherboards (with ram, cpus, batteries and heatsinks removed), that was easy cash for me, and in fact, just selling the motherboards pretty much covered what I paid for the computers.

With the copper wire, cut off all the connectors otherwise you get a much lower price from the scrap metal guy, a lot of these connectors will have gold plated pins, but once again, can be difficult to recover.

If you follow this advice, you will have a bunch of parts that can be stored in a few large cardboard boxes, about 1 wheelie bin of plastic rubbish and a few dollars in your pocket.


Then you start studying big time, you get some basic gear and safety equipment and you start by processing about 100g of closely cut ram fingers, which in theory should give you about 0.5g to 0.7g of gold, you will make a lot of mistakes the first time round and end up with about 0.2g to 0.5g of gold, but you will learn much much more than the value of the gold you lost. By about your 3rd batch of fingers you will have it all down and get most of the gold. READ THE SAFETY AND WASTE DISPOSAL THREADS !!!

Good Luck!