On 4 Nov 2010 at 17:00, William Donzelli wrote: Seems that the Cash4Gold mail-in gold scam outfits are missing a golden(!) opportunity. A few will currently accept cellphones. --Chuck

I am not saying there isn't gold value in these but.... every person I've run into doing the cpu for gold content thing usually knew very little about computers and even less about how expensive/dangerous it is to extract the gold. They just lived among piles and pile of old cpus and bits of circuit boards always waiting to cash in one day. That and did drugs. Not all but, many. I've run into a few. I seem to remember a recent new story about some people that killed themselves trying to extract the gold from computer parts. It a internet get rich quick scheme. There are lots of sites about it. I just randomly googled and first one I hit makes it could like a nightmare on step above making drugs in your basement. Which is obviously better money. http://www.finishing.com/188/89p3.shtml .You can get a sense of the guys hanging out on ebay looking for bags of cpu just reading a few posts there. On 11/4/2010 10:02 PM, dwight elvey wrote:

On 11/5/10 2:15 AM, William Donzelli wrote: I dunno, that seems pretty much on par (if, admittedly, a tad pessimistic) with the ones I've known. That was only ten or so, so not a huge dataset, but there was definitely some consistency. Most of those guys had it down to a science...they really knew how to take good stuff and turn it into raw materials that were worth less, and somehow end up making a damn good living at it. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 11/5/10 8:28 AM, John Foust wrote: Absolutely right. I (we) are just lucky that many of them are reasonably nice guys and will occasionally throw people like us (or allow people like us to purchase) a bone. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 11/4/2010 10:56 PM, Teo Zenios wrote: The problem is the cost to extract it.

In the 80's there was a guy here in the Southern California area doing fairly large scale gold recovery, and he was using guys who powered the scrap and highgraded it with cyanide in low quantities, and there was another guy who had hauled in and reconditioned an ore crusher system volkswagen. both were crooks, but he knew how crooked, and also that there was not a way to do any better on his own. I'm talking a 3 acre large yard full of electronics at a time on an ongoing basis, and he was a feeder to the actual recovery guy. he had a soft spot for Dec and PDP 11's and would not powder them, but everything else went in the junk. Jim On 11/4/2010 11:17 PM, William Donzelli wrote:

On 05/11/2010 12:10 AM, William Donzelli wrote: I'd worry more about your gold Budda. :)

On Friday, November 05, 2010, Eric Smith wrote: A few years ago, a scrapper would give me just over $6 per PPro in qty 1, so either he was an idiot (less likely), or there's something to this. Don't forget to include the bond-out wires, the fact that there's two pieces of silicon that need to be interconnected, and the gold plating on pins. Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

----- 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.

Patrick Finnegan wrote: I can think of a few other possible reasons that have nothing to do with gold content. The most obvious is simply that the resale value of a Pentium Pro was well over $6. I don't think those add up to more than a small fraction of my estimate of the amount of gold on the kovar lid, but that is why I allowed for being off by an order of magnitude in my estimate, and yet the amount of gold even with that fudge factor is far less than the wild claims being made. Eric

http://www.goldrefiningforum.com have the answer... or at least better data. http://www.goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=62&p=5… .... "Here's a shot of the 0.310 gram BB of gold from the exterior of a single PP cpu:" More data, PC mother boards is sold and bought by members on that forum at $4 per pound, if there were 10 ounces gold per ton the price would be higher.... but for mobile phone board I've seen figures in that area. I have also managed to extract 0.2g of gold from a single 286 CPU. There is a lot of old IC:s in ceramic capsule that is using a gold silicone braze for fastening the die and the lid. The surface plating is usually very thin. Disclaimer : No working or rare CPU:s were hurt in making this posting. /G?ran Eric Smith wrote:

At 12:02 AM 11/5/2010, dwight elvey wrote: Yesterday gold was $1392 per troy ounce, or $44.75 a gram. It was $386 in 1995 when the PPro was introduced. I would say this much: I bet I'd get a higher price on eBay who knew there was 0.3 grams. Wikipedia even says that some models have 1.1 grams. So Intel might've had $4 to $12 of gold in one. I seem to remember there were PPros that sold for $800+ when they were introduced, although there were some in the $200 range. Google Shopping says you can still buy 200 Mhz ones for $25 (used) to $41-$53 new. Short of Intel's own measurements, there's lots of interesting and questionable info out on the Internet. Heaven knows that gold bugs and gold scrappers always tell the truth and never stretch. Some factoids I found in a few minutes' searching: motherboards have 10 ounces of gold per ton average PC has 1 gram of gold a gram of gold per kilo for RAM 8088 ceramics have solid 10K gold pins This one had specific CPUs with pics and weights: http://forums.silverstackers.com/viewtopic.php?id=1853 And then there's the chip collectors. So I think I'll scrap those two quad PPro Proliant 7000 this weekend. Maybe I'll keep one CPU for a chip collection or gold hair comb. - John

I don't own an HP 2116 because of the price of silver back in the day. It was claimed to have $1000 worth of silver, and the seller got that though other comparable minis at the time were selling for no more than about $500 (entire rack usually). Same for 4381's. I paid $500 for one I had at one time due to gold recovery value (1985 time frame) Jim On 11/4/2010 1:56 PM, John Foust wrote: