Full PC Scrap for Gold & Precious Metals 

Thanks for all the videos Ben, I didn't mean to insult your intelligence with my comment on using punches...it was meant for people just starting out. I've learned so much from you and appreciate it. Thanks

Thank you for sharing this free video learned from it and will share I too recycle and the information was much valuable. Thanks again from the Dominican Republic Guillermo.

great video Ben as always...thank you!

Hey there Ben, i love the longer and more indepth vids bud, keep em comin.

Thanks for sharing Ben

where do you sell your de-populated chips? or the circuit chips? or sell your gold recovery chips for that matter? thank you!

Good video Ben, thank you

I am a computer repair person and have saved all pc parts since the 80s just to scrap we have just started and already made enough to buy 3 new computers and are working on more so its worth it if you have lots of parts with gold that are sitting around collecting dust,

Hey ben, i was wondering how much money the gold pins on a cpu give. I havent gotten the pins and weighted them yet

Keep the dvd lasers, build a death ray :P

my luck of course I went to open up an old pc only to find a huge wasp nest and I had pissed them all off. that hurt.

Capacitors: The mid size and bigger if you take a razor blade and peel off plastic, they have a good amount of prime copper spool that is easy to remove and adds up pretty quickly. I would not recommend the small capacitors, as it takes to much work to retrieve the copper, but they have copper spool as well if you have the time. More FREE Copper to add to pile and a bit more $$$ squeezed out!

A question please i have been collecting, gold from tel, palladium silver platinum, ram boards, sailboat, monitor, tv, tablet, do you know a factory where it is made? thank you greece

There are two neo magnets in the lazer head of those cd drives. Usually a nice little rectangle around .25 in. I use them for all sorts of things. They are on either side of the lens, under that thin shielding.

How do u tell the difference of all the different type of aluminum

Thank you fore this clip👍😊

Oh man! That was a rare motherboard!!! You could rebuild th... an air hammer... Never mind.

how do you sell boards with nothing left on it

I'd be all over those hard drives. Even 100 gbs would be a precious find. Data storage is expensive as hell, so anything that you can get for free is fantastic.

Great video once again, Ben! How do you know what are MLCC's and the valuable resistors (from your other vids) after you've depopulated the board using this method? Or does this refining process(s) separate out the precious metals from both? Thanks!

What do u do with Ic chips when you take them off

Thanks for sharing, I learned a lot. I don't understand why anyone would want to buy the ravaged motherboard after you're done with it though. Will they reuse the remaining components? Repurpose the board? Desperately recycle the remaining bits?

Good Work

Man its hard to watch you scraping good stuff

are there factories outside the opium canal with gold recycling? if so where and at what cost? Thanks in advance

Thanks for your useful video I find a lot of motherboards"old/new/laptop/pc" and he sell them for 1.5$ for each one without cpu is it a good deal?

pc builders: careful, this is a very expensive part and we don't want to break it pc scrappers: 𝕪𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝕘𝕠𝕝𝕕, 𝕙𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕚𝕥 𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣

How do you differentiate the low grade boards,high grade boards. And how do you recover the gold. Not familiar with electronic scrap other then the cords.

Informative thanks. Quick question for you do people really buy de-populated motherboards? I mean I honestly I don't see the value in it... saving the scrap board, unless you can go through and get some gold out of it maybe

Thank you for your informative video. Why do they buy the scrapped boards? What are they doing with them?

scraped my first PC was smiling thinking about a PC lol keep on scrapping

How much money you buy all computer unit

Any chance of you keeping some of those vintage working graphics card's and selling them on eBay, cause if you find a Matrox card keep them their great for retro vintage gaming in dos.

Nice job

is there a video on the best methods to collect materials? like maybe buying broken boards in bluk?

So these gold pins... how much do you get for them by the kg when scrapping?

That crumble could take awhile. Looks like a lot of fun to sort through. Just sit back in the evening, maybe watch some tv. Have about 10 to 20 containers ready to put them in!

The rods in the DVD drives are sometimes Stainless, especially older ones. The motors is on DVD is actually really easy to pull and get into. A few screws and it's off. A quick hammer hit to pop the top off, then needlenose pliers to pull out the copper. The brass rod, though check it, sometimes those are aluminum rather than brass pops out. It has a small magnet at the tip that I crunch off with a hammer. The smaller board I put in my low value board pile. The hard drives are usually easy to take apart. The outer case on really old ones might be aluminum. They are usually low grade Stainless on newer drives. The platters are almost always aluminum. The tips of the heads have a precious metal, and that was why I watched the video, was I am trying to learn exactly what and how to remove but it's worth a lot of money. The rest of the heads are usually aluminum and steel.

How much gold can you get from one pc? On average

I want all the hard drives from every computer

Is it worth depopulating instead if selling it just as boards ? How much you get for depopulated board ?

Thanks, Ben. I will follow your advice from your other vids as well and pick what I can prior to any scraping. I watched your MLCC's vs. inductors (?) again today and have made myself a chart based on all your info. Are all resistors marked with an "R" containing ruthinium? I will try to locate your vid on that. Cheers! Patrick

What can I do with the ic chips

This man reminds me of something, thats it a vulture. I'm here to learn as I am starting an e-waste business, I learned a lot.

Awesome...I'll have to check it out. I know they're silver inn the sides and no markings on them.

Thanks again, Ben, for clarifying all this. Now I understand about the thick film resistors ( from your vid on the subject- went back and viewed it again last night) NOT being the MLCC's looking resistors. Other than removing the thick filmed, I'm not too concerned with mixing the others. I'll get what I get from a refiner at this point. But I will try to keep the resistors in the mix to a minimum. Are those occasional, bright red capacitors MLCC's as wel?

would a board heater be better ?

how much one depopulated mother board weights?

where do you sell depopulated boards

Where do you get so many PC from?

Stripping out the pure copper from the wires all adds up.

Say Ben would you find yourself harvesting components off of uma graphics desktop board's rather than that of dedicated graphics cards.

How much grams of gold or maybe bricks can you get of gold you get from all the devices that you have and your storage

on those sound card take some of the solder mask off to check if the whole board is gold plated. iv found a few nice creative ones that are just covered even the steel bracket is gold plated!!

salve chiedo informazioni il metallo giallo un orefice di ce che e rame e vero per me e oro ma io ho fatto il test con acido 18 carati ma sparisce mi dai una risposta grazie

Where do you get all those computers? Cool videos btw! really helpful!

Hi Ben, today I scrapped my first heat sink with the piece of copper rod inside. I put the heat sink on two bricks with the copper above the gap then I punched it out with a steel bar and hammer. What a lovely piece of copper, reminds me of an ingot. Looking forward to getting more of these. Great vids Ben. keep them coming.

I sell the components on ebay, always a lot more money than recycling them. Edit: yep just sold a 486 motherboard for 20 bucks shipped.

Thank you

Have you thought about doing your gold and precious metal separation and extraction? It is a tedious process but it looks like you have enough supply to make it worth while.

Oh, Good Lord, I'm not doing any processing beyond the AP method to strip gold from the boards....I'll find someone else to buy my stuff, etc. although I am going to try the reverse electroplating method soon....

hard drive is really worth selling, if you scrap it you can get a lot of money on the magnets

Najbolji ste , pozdrav iz Hrvatske

Hi Ben so after de populating the board would you call it mid grade???!!!! I now get brass from power rails and copper slabs off CPU’s n now I will get boards n brass rods from optic drives and I thank you for that

How do you process (if at all) your GP material?

so once you've made such a huge mess with that air chisel.... how do you clean and seperate all those pins that just scattered everywhere and got stuck in the carpet? in most cases with expansion slots and such, you can just work a flat head screwdriver under the plastic connector and slowly, carefully pry upward pulling the pins through the plastic, then take a pait of side cutters and clip them all off at the base pretty easily... much less of a mess to pick over with tweezers later on.

@eWaste Ben. Ben, I like how you de-populate the motherboard's. I also learned about the MLCC's with palladium. What all contains palladium on motherboards and drive cards? Dan

CPU fans/HS's cost £10+ in the UK. If the heatsink was undamaged I'd convert it into a funky desk clock or candle holder. Many things can & should be directly re-purposed by creative bods rather than be scrapped for raw metal ; ) Still a good video though!

Is there a reason you scraped all the tiny parts into a carpet? It seems like it would be a hassle to pick them out.

DVD readers have 2 motors, laser diode, 2 small neo magnets, a bunch of optics, and a bit of aluminium for the carriage or plastic

So you don't really bother with the tiny ones....? I was curious if the metals in the MLCC's are separable from the resistors in your other vids at point of processing. Thanks

Kind of sad how much stuff we manufacture as a civilization that ends up as obsolete junk. That computer may still have functioned, but its utility probably isn't that good if you want to run modern software. All of those components are objects that took a tremendous amount of time and energy to design and manufacture, from mining the raw metals out of the ground to designing the circuits in a CAD program down to the assembly line that put it all together to sell to some customer. This is better than dumping it in a landfill though.

I have a audio slot card that's entirely gold plated. Scrape the green if it's light green colored. Sometimes gold plated PCB layer underneath

About how many pc’s is it worth to start scrapping?

What do u do withe the ic chips

Hi Ben those little fiddly motors are a bit of a pain ..true...but they can go in as a copper bearing motor ..25 Cents a lb vs. 4 cents a lb...same as the motors in the fans ...a little , but it does add up :) do you just leave the copper on the boards ?

I have an ewaste facility here in the US. Yes you can scrap alot of old computers. But refurbishing alot of them will bake you alot more money. Selling each PC for at the lowest of $60-70. Make a windows bootable USB "its free" and off you go. Scrapping them will only bring about $2k-3k usd monthly But refurbishing and scrapping makes at least $8k monthly

How much coast gold of 1 PC - $5? I think u can take much more sell by parts, but however..

Hi ben. Where do u sell the boards after depopulation

When watching this I got an ad for planet gold rush lol

great vid mate. how do u pick up all the pins?

I wish we could get payed for scrap steel in Norway but here we have to pay to deliver it. Isn't that a bit crazy. Love to see your videos. Currently it is -12 celsius out in my scrapper garage so not much fun scrapping here now even if I really should have gone through all the motherboards I have stockpiled.

@eWaste Ben. Hi Ben, I did learn a bit more from your video. One thing is I take out the hard drive platters and the drive motors and save them in other boxes. I'm up to 12 pounds in platters now. But here's two questions I wanted to ask you is, is there any silver on the motherboards and cards. Also question two, you mentioned you also take off the MLCC's, what's the story with them? Thanks for a great video, Dan

we have scrap computer, but we dont know where can sell it or who needed and buy it from Jordan

Nice video ..Tnx

guessing the North and South bridge (the two big chips you hacked off) have silver under them.

Thanks for video I like

wow.. you hit the motherload. good vid Ben.

Hey dude, I'm sure someones already said it or you've worked it out, but the "stuff" on cpus is thermal paste, the good stuff is made from silver.

eWaste Ben by the time you scrap the whole thing out and get all the precious metals out, how much are you making off of 1 computer? I just want to know if tearing all that out is worth it or not.

Prescient, Ben! There are neodymium magnets in that dvd reader "eye" and the price of those has gone up 50% just this year (nearly five years after your video).

Great video Ben. U might need a bigger truck!

how much is the gold worth?

Hello man! What is the reference of your ryobi ? I would have the same 🤗

You would get allot more for the power supply if you would sell them with the cables still attached!

would you make more money from scraping it rather than selling the computer?

Who, or where do you sell the boards to?? I have always wondered about that. I never thought about actually doing any of this (process) till I started watching your channel. Thanx man, got a sub. 👍

those pins that are gold plated, the plating is only about 3 microns thick. just the same as the "fingers" (interface pins of addon cards). I have already once tried to isolate all the gold from all the parts that were gold plated from 9 motherboards (All ASUS P5-A) and used concentrated acids (nitric and sulfuric) to extract the net worth of gold from them. I ended up with (in total) a solid gold nugget that weighed 7 grams. that's it.

When i think, i would pay good money to have one of those computers 20y ago ...

ok.. so, if you were to take that computer that you did in this video, what would be the TOTAL weight of gold you get out of it?