Old computers

[NotABigDeal]

Whoops!

Almost forgot to mention....

just about everything you see & think would be gold on circuit boards IS, usually it is high grade too!

HOWEVER, it is so thin, the thinness could be measured in microns...so you will indeed need a lot to add up to something significant.

ADDITIONALLY, certain circuits & processors will have VERY high grade INSIDE of them, invisible to the naked eye. If you break open a Pentium or Pentium Pro processor, you will see very fine threads of almost pure gold.

As time has progressed, the industry has gotten better at using less & less gold. Current processors do not have anywhere near the gold content of older processors.

DTEJD

Welcome and good info. Thanks.

Deal

[silversaddle1]

17 years. That's how long we have been in the computer recycling business. Me and my wife. Two kids to help take stuff apart. We do this full time, 7 days a week sometimes. We are a very small company, but we recycle over 250,000 pounds of computers a year. 90% of what we do is from large data centers all across the US. It pays well, but is a lot of work. We refine nothing. We sell all our sorted scrap to other dealers/refineries. And we do large amounts. Last month alone we shipped over 10,000 pounds of high grade tele-comm boards to Dallas. They are going overseas to be refined, I'm sure. So if you are looking to get rich at the computer recycling game, I'm here to tell you that you can! Just be willing to work your ass off and don't sit around waiting for customers to come to you.

[NiBullionCu]

The amount of Platinum in hard drives is miniscule.

I have yet to see a post from anyone that has successfully recovered platinum from hard drive platters.

see:

September 13, 2011

I work in hard drive production. I can tell you the manufactured disks have either a glass core or an aluminum magnesium core, and then a super thin-film coating of magnetic material, then diamond-like carbon, also thin-film. The platinum is sputtered on with other materials in a layer just 10s of angstroms thick, along with cobalt, chrome, etc. Total manufactured price is under $1 per disk, the amount of platinum involved is minuscule.
Sng Guil
Engineering - San Francisco, California

from: http://www.finishing.com/295/05-2.shtml