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Does anyone have experience selling old computer parts which contain gold? I have 2 old computers and was wondering what they're worth. Is it even possible to find a dealer that buys scrap electronics at a fair price for the gold/silver?
Also does anyone have any idea how many ounces of gold would be in an old computer?
Cost to extract would far outweigh the very small amounts of gold in your computers unless you had many tens of old boards. If you're lucky, they might have components which are still in demand for people who are still using outdated technology. SDRAM and AGP cards are absurdly expensive for performance compared to newer technology. No supply, low demand. Might get lucky. If your hardware is in no demand, your best bet is to pay for proper recycling.
saw a discovery channel documentary on it and it takes 2000 computers to get an ounce of gold. The companies that do this have large machines, streamlined production and do all sorts of electronics.
recycle your computer :)
I checked ebay and people are selling old scrap electronic circuit boards for around $2/lb....interesting :)
I'm a computer guy ....I get a lot of calls from people asking me if I have any broken computers to sell them.
Some very old computers have gold circuit boards, from which you can get several ounces of gold. These were 1980's model computers that were selling for $15000+. Modern computers don't have enough for you to get yourself. It's not worth it for domestic recyclers to get to, so they are shipped to Asia where they are put into a big pile and burned, and you wind up with a huge pile of copper with some gold in it.
http://www.businesspundit.com/wp-con...ldschlager.jpg
It's the silver from photography that you want.
about 4 years ago, I an old friend of mine had a cousin who ran a business destroying data and old computers. governments and large corps have laws about data retention and destruction.
long story short, this person actually hired out inmates from the prison to remove the gold from the older computers. the processor heat sinks were the source. I helped them out one week cause they would always have parties with two bear fridges pool tables, etc.. it where I watched the superbowl at when the bucs won..
anyways, we had this special tool to dig out the parts with gold in them from the heat sinks. no it wasn't pure gold, but let me just tell you these little parts are about the size of a lighter flint and there were about 50 of them per core. They sold the gold in 55 gallon drums that weighed 1500 pounds each. They sold them to a chinese firm, highest bidder at about 10,000 dollars per barrel in flats of 40 barrels. If I recall correctly, it came out to be about 68 dollars and ounce for unprocessed or impure gold.
I'm a chemist and about 2 years ago, we had to clean out this company that was bought out. The new company was donating everything to the university as a tax writeoff. The computers they had were too old to put to good use so we accepted them as a donation so the company could get the writeoff and we had to dispose of them. It was about 100 computers but I took all the circuit boards out of each one. I then spent the day in the lab dipping them into aquaregia, which is ridiculously strong acid. It strips the boards of their gold. After that, I filtered all my gold out. I got about 40 bucks worth of gold. Given that I probably used about 10 bucks worth of acid and spent 4 hours doing this, I barely made minimum wage that day.
But just as another poster said, if you can find an old computer from the 80s, they were much bigger and had much more gold content. I did the same thing with an ancient computer that was laying around and got about 500 bucks worth of gold out of it.
3:1 Nitric to Hydrochloric or vice versa? did it strip any other metal besides gold? and how did you filter the gold out?Quote:
Originally Posted by theoakman