exaggerated claims regarding gold in Pentium Pro (was Re: CPUscrap)

----- Original Message ----- From: "William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, November 05, 2010 10:50 AM Subject: Re: exaggerated claims regarding gold in Pentium Pro (was Re: CPUscrap) They can also get burned on the way down. Many years ago (1999 I think) I was talking to the Coin, Silver, and Stamp shop owner I used to visit since I was in highschool (early 1980s). He was telling me about how he made several million during the last gold rush buying scrap and selling it, and how his $1,000,000 retirement bag of scrap got sold for $125K (after much begging) when the price of gold dropped afterwards and nobody wanted to touch scrap gold because it was dropping too fast. I think he pretty much was about even with what he sold and what he purchased that he was stuck with. Thankfully I loaded up on gold and silver back then, and even better still have it now. Back to the PPro, the normal 256K cache units seemed to have the gold top, while the 1MB units seemed to have a black top (not even sure what that was made from). No idea how they differed inside but the pin count had to be the same to fit in the same socket. Seems like I have quite a few of those high yield CPUs since I like early Pentiums and 486 CPUs. I can't really see selling them for scrap even if the pile is worth a bunch of money. It does reinforce my thinking that the 486 era chipped machines are going to be decimated by recyclers. I did hear from a part time recycler back in the 90's that old server chips tended to have quite a bit of gold in them, but I figured he meant the super computers and not Pentium Pros. And to be honest I didn't even know those 486 chips had much at all in them to be high yield.