.3 Grams Gold Recovered out of each Pentium Pro CPU

[DaveLembke]

Found this video below on youtube when looking to see how much gold could be recovered from scrap CPU's. The process this person went through in the video to me isnt worth all the work and cost of materials, or at least in small recovery amounts it costs more to get the gold out of them than the gold is worth. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME as for the process they show can be deadly.

Of the .3 grams of gold they claim to recover out of every Pentium Pro CPU that comes out to 0.0105822 Ounces and at current gold bullion value thats $13.79 (USD) at $1303.30 per ounce and at the highest purity of .999 fine gold. They recovered 1.5 grams of gold which is $68.95 (USD) in this video if its .999 fine. The material and time costs still to me aren't worth it as well as the toxic gas and toxic waste to get rid of in the end.

Once again... Do not try this at home, but this was rather interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9cfzN7fvBU

[BC_Programmer]

It's not even a huge gain, those CPUs are often sold for about $40-$50 on places like eBay to collector types.

[DaveLembke]

nods I was thinking they are still likely worth more to a collector than their weight in gold.

Its not very often that you can take something junk or old for lower than cost and make more out of it.

For a short while I was buying up buffalo nickels on ebay that were otherwise junk nickels for jewelry and got the idea to see if I could find some key dates using an acid on them to etch away lesser dense nickel from the area of the date to get a date to show. In the $30 purchase of 100 no date buffalo nickels there was a 1913-S Type 2 that I was able to sell as an acid date to someone looking to complete their set inexpensively for a genuine filler nickel for $75 USD.

In G-4  ( Good 4 ) condition its currently listed at $265 USD according to PCGS and 1,209,000 were struck, but the majority of them destroyed by heavy wear, so I thought the one day why not buy up some nickels cheaply that have dates worn off and use this nic-a-date acid on them at $5 for the bottle and see what dates appear.


 I also found some other semi-key dates from Denver and San Francisco and was able to sell these at more than my cost in time and materials but at a bargain below the Good - 4 condition price tags to people and made a nice profit, however the sources on ebay that I was buying up piles of no-date with mint mark buffalo nickels dried up and I was only interested in the piles that were sold with mint marks as for the D = Denver and S = San Francisco coins for the buffalo nickels people want and Philadelphia ( = no mint mark below the FIVE CENTS ) doesn't have enough of a rarity to them to make any money.

 I sold the Philadelphia no-date nickels below other sellers price tags, at about 3 cents each below my cost to move the junk back out because I didn't want to hold onto junk common no date nickels. The margin made on the keys and semi-keys padded the 3 cent loss on each one. I made around $250 on this with about 2 hours of labor and just the right place at the right time to buy up mint marked no-date nickels on the cheap to reveal the dates and there were people desperate enough for these harder to get nickels to pay a premium for them for them to either complete their collection on the cheap or some collectors have a sweet tooth to specific keys and semi-keys to collect in numbers and any grade as long as the price is reasonable they will buy them all up to collect in hoard quantities for keys and semi-keys.

[Geek-9pm]

Too bad. never thought old CPU's would be worth anything.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/28911037/Gold-Content-List-in-CPU-Chips
The amount of gold varies a lot. from about .1 to .5 g for Cyrix , IBM  and Intel units made almost twenty years ago.

The  AMD-K5 PR133 now goes for $15 and up on eBay. So if you have one, you might get more money for less effort by selling it. But just wait. Maybe someday the prices of gold with raise.

Or maybe not.
Why Gold Is Collapsing  (NASDAG 2016)

[BC_Programmer]

am486DX-120 chips are around 40 bucks or so, probably about the same as any recoverable gold.

And you also have to consider the cost of materials to extract the gold, too, I suppose.

[Salmon Trout]

Around the late 1970s/early 1980s I knew a guy who could not get his inherited family farm to make money. The land was marginal for crops and cattle was a loss maker for many farmers at that time. He was the kind of guy who fixed up farm machinery and made stuff out of parts. A wizard in fact. Interested in electronics & IT and the very new 8-bit "microcomputers", Exidy Sorcerer, Nascom, etc. Used to build and sell them. He had some trucks, so he started bidding for contracts to haul away redundant mainframes being replaced by minis. A whole mainframe installation was a lot of equipment cabinets - CPU, tape drives, disk drives, etc. When he got them back to his farm he would take out the boards and put them in a stone breaker, a big rotating steel drum with heavy iron balls. What came out was like metal/plastic corn flakes and powder. This was processed using chemicals - strong acids and a cyanide compound. Eventually precipitated gold was placed in a crucible in an induction furnace and melted to make ingots. This whole business was done on the very edge (or way over the edge) of legality. The farm was not licensed for industrial use, the guys he got to drive the trucks and operate and fix the machinery were paid in cash, the storage of hazardous chemicals was not done in a legal way or registered. The farm was on the flood plain of a river and flooded about every 30 years. He told me he was worried about the acid and cyanide mixing in a flood and making a gas cloud that could kill everyone on the farm and in the nearby village. The induction furnace needed three-phase power but the electricity company wanted an awful lot of money to provide it, so he joined a used truck engine to an alternator, via a modified tractor gearbox, and ran it that way. The money he got for hauling away the computers was cancelled out by the cost of getting rid of the non-valuable scrap, and the wages he paid his unofficial workers. The gold made him money, because of the amount he got, and because he cut every cost to the bone. As a farmer he could buy untaxed diesel fuel for running all of the machinery. If he done everything by the book, he would have lost money.

[DaveLembke]

WOW cool story Salmon and pretty scary that that guy could have made a poison gas cloud that killed people off if a flood caused everything to mix.

I worked back in 1994 for a electronics company that was run by 2 brothers. One of which was Electronics Investor who would hire engineers and technicians to copy ( possibly stolen ) electronics designs and sell them as his own product, and the other brother a Licensed Lawyer who wasn't allowed to practice in Hawaii ever again after something went way wrong with his lawyer skills or lack there of in that state. The place had poor ventilation and all sorts of chemicals for the PCB manufacturing process and stuff was just flushed down toilets etc for waste liquids etc. Also lack of PPE ( Personal Protection Equipment ) like safety glasses etc. Somehow he was able to keep the state from shutting him down for about 20 years and then it caught up with him to which him and his brother were sort of kicked out of manufacturing in New Hampshire and so they then went to Vermont where they ran their business as shady as before but more cautiously until the lawyer brother passed away and the lone brother was facing legal problems and no longer had the low cost shady lawyer that would do anything to keep him out of hot water or jail etc to which it finally shut down. I still to this day remember the haze and smell and taste of the wave solder machine running because their ventilation system consisted of a $12 box fan laying on its backside on a hole in ceiling that lead up to the attic of the cabin that was 20ft by 60 ft in size and so the flux fumes would blow up into the attic but there was no fan up there blowing it to the outside of the building. So the stench/cloud would come back down to the workers on the ground floor which was a cement slab. Friend who referred me to that job woudl climb into the fluorine PCB bath tank and have to scrub it to which he was likely exposed to all sorts of nasty stuff. I stayed away from the Fluorine bath which was like an ice chest that the boards would be dipped in fluorine. I worked there for 4 months until pay checks were bouncing two weeks in a row and when I complained about why paychecks are bouncing the owner stated that if you want to get paid be the first to the bank on payday as for the early bird gets the worm and the slow one gets the rotten egg when the money in their runs out. There is some money in there but I have to pay myself, engineers, sales department, and technicians and you all are at the bottom of the ladder and priority. Nice Business Owner Right!

 So I demanded him to pay me in cash for what he owed me which was around $350 for the week after taxes for a 40 hour week at the time. He paid me in cash with a smile and said see you on Monday. I said sure. And never went back after paid in full.  When he had to move from New Hampshire to Vermont he tried to head hunt me from my job at Allen Bradley / Rockwell Automation. I said I was happy with the $13.50 an hour in 1998 as an Electronics Technician and not interested in working for him. Additionally I had signed a non-compete agreement with Allen-Bradley/ Rockwell Automation so I couldnt work for any other electronics jobs that could conflict with them. I didnt want to lose my job that was a great job over some extra money for a slum-boss. He even offered to pay in cash because of his past history of playing games with peoples paychecks and I said NO THANK YOU! Its amazing the guy never went to jail.

I also learned through this experience how banks handle employers who give you bad checks. Its not between the bank and the employer writing bad checks. Its between you and the employer, and by the way that check that we paid you for... you have to pay the bank back for the fact that the check is bad and bounced because the funds weren't there. The bank wont take a loss and the bank wont legally go after the employer who plays games with insufficient funds, however he got a $25 fee for each bounced check which to him was nothing because he had deep pockets and he enjoyed being an idiot as the most appropriate thing to call him here. So I had paid my rent with the paycheck that bounced and the bank was now demanding me to pay them or I would face legal action against me. I was like THIS IS INSANE and the system is messed up to go after me and not them for writing the bad checks. The system should go after them for the money + the bounce fee.  Paid the bank back the money they gave me as for with the $350 I got from them + the $350 I got from him in cash, I had to give the $350 that I collected from him to the bank to cover the $350 they gave me. What a headache that was! 

Only good thing that became of all that was that job gave me the Prior Working Experience Status in electronics manufacturing which most employers want 3 to 5 years experience in the field and Allen-Bradley / Rockwell when they asked why I was there for only 4 months at Allied Electronics and I shared with them the pay checks bouncing as the reason for leaving and the local manager who knew Allied Electronics issues from hearing it through grape vine and others who use to work there that now worked at Ab/Rockwell saw that I had the skill to do the job and the problem wasnt in me it was with Allied, so the 3 to 5 year rule was waived whereas anyone off the street without prior work experience with electronics might not land a job as easily. *Allied Electronics by the way is not the large Allied Electronics that most may know with the large catalog. This Allied Electronics that I worked for was a small business that somehow had the right to use that name. Didnt want anyone thinking the larger company was the one mentioned here.