In Pictures: Tom's Hardware Recovers Gold And Silver From CPUs

[eddieroolz]

Poor little CPUs

But then, all that and still a tiny BB's worth of gold. Just imagine how many parts the children in Third World countries go through to meet quotas...

 

[or-ex]

cool, i have a amd k6-2 also... but i use my 2500k of course

 

[A Bad Day]

I want to see them try and extract gold from GPUs...

Preferably the Radeon 6990 and the GTX 590.


Maybe this will settle the score on which GPU is the best.

 

[Guest]

awesome article!

 

[wiyosaya]

Considering gold is priced at approximately $1,740 per ounce, I am not so sure that the naysayers, except those who urge caution, have a good case against doing this. Even as "collectors" items at $25, if it takes 32 of them to get an ounce of gold, you would make more doing this since 32 * 25 = $800. Seems like a potentially worthwhile choice to "go for the gold" instead when your return would likely be over 2x their value as CPUs assuming you don't blow yourself up.

Then again, since most of these chemicals are likely classified as hazardous materials, good luck to the average home user getting them from a "reputable" chemical supply house because such chemical suppliers will not ship these chemicals to anything other than an address in an "industrial" zone. 9/11 has put a big bullet hole in the garage hobbyist's ability to pursue things like this as paranoia is extremely rampant where chemicals are concerned even though I am sure there are hobbyists out there who pursue legitimate uses of such chemicals and know how to handle them.

 

[megamanx00]

Poor little CPUs oh well.

 

[Guest]

Love it

 

[Guest]

Forget metals from CPUs. Not much money in that. How to we make meth?

Part 2: Tom's Hardware Breaks Bad

 

[Guest]

OMG !! my brother was telling me about farming gold from cpu for months , he is already collecting processors with pins , i told him its not worth it but he is so stupid , any way he got like 50+ . i wonder if the BB only from 1 processor or more than 1 ?

 

[Guest]

if you do this, don't be surprised that the very fine gold wires shown in pic 17 turns out to be copper. Most semicon companies are now trying to replace gold wires in their processes to copper to reduce cost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirebonding

 

[NightLight]

My ever growing collection of ancient procs will remain safely behind the luxury display case they are in

 

[quangluu96]

All of that work putting in to extract the BB gold cost more than the gold itself lol

 

[pro-gamer]

i'm going to wash my whole system.heheh

 

[rambaye]

OH my GOD
I read all this and was shocked to see 1 tiny gold dot . it will be much more expensive than the gold in the market

But thanks for telling us how to recover our money that we have spend in purchasing all the new bugs

 

[tsnor]

That's crazy. I have a $3600 Pentium 100 system in the basement (l got a good deal when I bought it). Why would I want to melt it to get a few dollars of gold?

(Aside: as long as whatever you upgrade to fits in the same case, it's the same $3600 system. Too bad they changed PSU form factors).

 

[gto127]

I had heard some where that each cpu contained about $4 worth of gold. You sure disproved ,that not to mention what a pain to extract the small amount. Thanks for well written article

 

[Guest]

Actually doing a quick estimate of the volume of gold and silver extracted, even if you assume that both are perfectly pure, at current gold/silver prices, the amount of metal extracted as pictured in this article is worth approx $4 each. Since it appears that they used many processors to accomplish even this modest amount... you would be lucky to get 25 cents of metal/processor.

(I assumed the volume of silver was = volume of 1 penny, and the volume of gold to be that of a sphere of diameter 2mm)

 

[Guest]

Right, it's nice and all but extremely bad for the environment lol, NOx is much worst than CO2 in terms of contributing to global warming.

 

[nityking1]

When i get done with a CPU and its rendered unusable or I don't have a use for it I put it in a plastic cover and frame them. I have 12 so far hanging in my office. It's neat to see them and look back and think of what they were used for over the years.

 

[darkavenger123]

In case some of you do not realized, China have an industry of mining gold from old PCs hardware...and it is killing their citizen....so be glad you'r rich enough you do not have to mine gold from CPUs to make a living and can afford to throw away that Iphone with cracked screen into the dustbin. In China, people will die for it. Literally.

 

[Guest]

What other chemical can replace for Sodium Metabisulfite? can i use Ordinary Salt?

 

[freggo]

Sorry, but I do not skip thru 26 pages to read this so THG can rake up a good Ad count.
As much as I am a loyal reader I have better things to do that waste my time on a purposely inefficient article layout.
Too bad. Prob. was interesting.

 

[theyouthis]

[citation][nom]KonstantinDK[/nom]Chlorine gas is WMD as long as I know. (first used in WW1) Shouldn't FBI be ll over your asses?Every1 be careful, it may suffocate
u.http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/chlorine/basics/facts.asp[/citation]
Cool experiment. see what happens when you fill a bucket with bleach and amonia in a closed room.
P.s. dont do this

 

[Guest]

You guys are such nerds! God I love you guys! Wish I could do super cool nerdy stuff like this! lol

 

[CocoHacker]

I was expecting a 'Scrooge McDuck' moment in the end.