Xeon CPU's

[snacker47]

Hi All,

I have a bunch of the Xeon CPU's, please see my attachment. I would say I've created a bit of a mess. Thus far I've been working with gold fingers from memory sticks and various other cards and things have progressed quite well.

Seems that after reading through the forum though that I've created a lot of work for myself and here's why.

I've had the Xeon cpu's in a Muriatic Acid/Hydrogen Peroxide bath now with a bubbler going for about 3-4 days and my solution is a quite brown. I'd say I put in approximately 20 Xeons and I'm wondering whether it's worth my time to try and salvage this particular batch? It's still been great fun learning what I like to work with and what components are simply not worth my time due to the investment in time and the final yield. Going forward, I think I'll stay with what I enjoy the most which is the memory sticks and PCI type cards since they're a lot simpler and I seem to have a fairly good grasp on the process. I also get a few of these cool boards from old Cisco Switches that are covered with beautiful gold and the lye bath really helps to remove the solder mask. So... that's a little bit about me.

So, at this juncture I am looking for feedback on what the nice folks here on the forum think I should do with this batch? Abort or spent time and try to salvage the gold. After 3-4 days I can still see the lovely gold plating on the underside of the Xeon CPU cores and the pins of course are all dissolved. The core (looks like lead perhaps or steel?) is eating away but it's a very slow process. I've dumped in about 3 cups of muriatic and 2 cups of Hydrogen Peroxide in this batch and have that bubbler running 24-7.

In the mean time I keep reading but I'm adimittedly a little confused with all of the information. I don't mind work but I also like asking questions please pardon my inquiry if I'm not successful thus far in using the search feature to find answers

Cheers,
S

 

[rickbb]

Problem one, you should remove the heat sinks first and I crush the little componets with a hammer. Helps keep the AP cleaner.

Looks like most of the gold is still on the green fiber. Maybe you can wash them off, remove the heat sinks and start again.

I usually leave it a week or so with an air bubbler going. The cheap aquarium pump with air stone.

 

[g_axelsson]

I take off the heat spreader with a thin knife, cutting the glue between the metal and base, then with a twist it pops off.

The die usually ends up on the heat spreader. It is soldered with indium solder and will drop off after a couple of days in pure HCl. After that I rinse the heat spreader off and save it for the sulphuric deplating cell. There should be some gold among the solids leftover that was dissolved by the solder and released in the acid. It looks like good plating and not only gold flash.

The base with all the pins I throw in a jar with old AP (copper chloride solution). The copper cements on the pins and the solder goes into solution, it takes the pins off in a couple of hours. The rest of the circuit board (after washing) goes to the low yield circuit boards that I sell to the local scrapyard.

The pins I just put in a jar with HCl and forgets about it for a while, eventually it will dissolve the base metals and I'm left with a little bit of gold.

Göran

 

[snacker47]

Low and behold on the bottom of the nearly black bath of goo was my beautiful gold and it sat on the bottom and was very easy to filter out.

Another really cool little trick I learned today (this was before I started heating my big Cisco boards which are literally filled with gold from end to end) was that what originally appeared to be a daunting task of having to remove the myriad little resistors from the boards from the gold was actually quite easy. I'd mixed the Xeons and the boards like the newbie that I am all in one big batch (won't do that again). Will continue forward with smaller batches with specific types of materials only per batch. Anyhow...for some reason, by merely filling the bucket up with water and creating a vortex the gold tends to float to the top. At this point I would simply poor out the gold & water into a coffee filter and the resisters seems to be heavier/more dense and would naturally remain on the bottom so I did "not" have to deal with that daunting task of picking out all of those little resistors. Save me tons of valuable time. Now I use lye and make sure that my boards are clean and scraped before I submerge them in an AP bath.

Cheers All,

S