Experiment: Can You Mine Gold From Old Motherboards?

[Guest]

photo 9 no full face mask, air mask for chemical spills or chlorine gas ... was there one but not pictured? thanx for the great write up and read though!

 

[Xcurior]

interesting... I would just use mercury to seperate the gold though seems like less steps. thats what they use when they mine it to seperate it from the zinc/copper and other rocks lol.

 

[Guest]

Turns out to about $1.35 value in Gold if you assume it is 1.5 mm in diameter, it is pure, and Gold is about $1230 per tr. oz.

 

[rooket]

wow this answered a whole world of questions for me. guess I'll still keep putting my old electronics in with the e-waste because it makes no sense to try to harvest anything from them at all whatsoever.

 

[shizen]

need 10000 more old motherboards to make a tiny golden ring

 

[Guest]

nice article. How many motherboards did it take to get that little gold ball?

 

[Guest]

I like this article, but what are we talking about? I'm looking at this small pellet sized gold piece and was that from the pictured pile in the beginning of the article? It would be nice to have some clear consise numbers. Numbers like for example we have striped down 20 computers and clipped rougly two pounds of the gold pins off the connectors and produced this BB sized pellet. Or, is that one computers worth of gold. I love it when people tell me something is not lucrative when in actually it might very well be. Besides copper is worth more than gold simply for the fact that you can get a whole lot more of it. At 4$ a pound, Strip those unused power cables my friends, just leave the manhole covers alone ok?

 

[rfox911]

very interesting article, not sure i would EVER try this but still

 

[B_I_O_M]

Friends, I am operating a business that disposes of old motherboards!

 

[NagromNniuq]

And that, my friends, is why gold plated things are worthless...

Speaking of which, I need to go buy a Monster cable. They are so much better than other cables because they have gold connectors...

 

[alul]

hey it seems no one around is familiar with the concept of "opportunity cost" !! it means that every opportunity, has a cost! so if you wanna dig a little gold out of your stuff, you will need to spend money on buying things like solvents. furthermore, time you spend there has a monetary value, summing it all up, I don't think gold extraction from your electronic junks will make sense, but for a Friday afternoon experience, it seems fun

 

[rmatheson_57]

Two things to consider 1: I looked at the article and I noticed that they give you the chemical names but not the amounts of chemical to make the solutions at every step. 2: if I were to make the solutions and discharge the clorine gas outside and it makes someone sick or kills them that would be a bad thing and I would have the EPA knocking at my door. I think I will pass on this experiment.

 

[kckrich]

LMAO! best thing i've ever seen. so awesome.

 

[ritesh_nair]

greghome :I wonder how many socket AM2 mobos would it take to get a
kilo of gold like this.............hmmmmmmmmmm


Jeez now the last thing i want is a series of How many motherboards ? joke like the light bulb joke series. HEHEHEH

 

[mpx69mpx]

I find that the risk and troble and time is way to hight for 2 $ or more lol

 

[vada]

i heard sr-12 mobo from evga uses 300% more gold than normal mobos... need to visit some computer junkyard soon.... a nice article!!

 

[pmjnusantara]

whether the procedure could be applied to get the gold from rock containing gold?

tx.

 

[Guest]

how many process after i can get gold ,and show me how many chamicals use it

 

[jjjemp]

can you explain step 15, precipitation - is water added to the sodium metabisulphite first before it is added to the gold solution? or are you detailing the reaction got when you spoon some of the powder directly into the gold solution?

 

[Guest]

can i get the step by step tutorial, or the e-book if u have it, u can send it to : ojikwell@gmail.com because i have a lot of e-waste. Thanks a Ton mate

 

[Guest]

Is there an efficient method to get the pins or micro gold from the motherboard aside from using plier, cutter, screw driver etc.? Can we not soak the motherboard to a chemical or acid to have all the micro gold extracted before it will be put to gold process recovery? I am asking these questions to look for an answer to facilitate or make it easier to separate the pins from the motherboard. Thanks

 

[Guest]

I am a chemistry hobbyist and i have sum processor and i want to recover it shall you help me please.

 

[Guest]

There's always other ways to get those gold in an easier way. But then again, we are talking about more dangerous chemicals to separate gold from these electronic devices. I for one buy old, defective electronic/computer components and extract gold from it and sell it in the market. If you ask me it's surely worth it. I buy some old computer for a dollar (that's a whole defective unit with CPU, Motherboard, etc. **the older the better**) and extract a gram of gold or more from it which is worth about $40. Less all the effort and expense gives you roughly $26-$32 net profit per gram. so just imagine 500 units of defective motherboards, processors, DIMMS, Cellphone Boards etc. The only secret there is HOW TO DO IT.

 

[Ge100]

Where I can find all the quimicals materials

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Remember it well! Brilliant experiment, and I recall at the time thinking it was one of the best Tom's articles I'd read. Still is, to this day