7 May
2011
7 May
'11
9:58 p.m.
On 5/7/11 8:55 PM, "William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
What part of $1500/oz do you not understand?
--
Will
On May 7, 2011 5:58 PM, "Geoffrey Reed" <geoffr at zipcon.net> wrote:
Looking at the vintage computing on ebay, there's someone with 15 Ppro chips
"for gold recovery" and it's been bid up to $390. I am fairly sure that
the amount of gold in a Ppro chip is not worth that much, plus the cost of
extracting it is pretty high....
Unless I am mistaken, the plating on the lid is only a couple microns thick.
And while the chips themselves weigh in at 6.8 ish ounces each, only a small
portion of that is metals, the bulk of the weight is ceramic material. I
tried to find current data on how much gold is contained in ppro chips, but
all I was able to find were links to pay "make a fortune in gold recovery"
e-books....
1 ounce = 28.3495231 grams
Since it it precious metal weight we are discussing here....
1 troy ounce = 31.1034768 grams
Ah, finally a hit or two.... It looks like Ppro chips have .5 to .75 grams
of gold per chip. So to get 1 ounce of gold you would need roughly 62 chips
(.75 grams was for processing at an actual lab, not in a home setting), and
that is assuming that you are able to extract the minimum and that you can
get pure gold as an end product without serious lab equipment....
So assuming one were to be able to process pure gold out of those chips,
$390 is pretty much the break even point where you spent as much on the
chips as you are going to get out of them from processing (and that isn't
even taking into account the time spent on extracting, and the cost of the
chemicals and equipment used in processing the chips.)
Having torn one of them apart years ago when it burned out, I can tell you
that the wires running through the ceramic are not gold. And the sites I've
found information on mention palladium and other metals in the ceramic.