How many gold chip from a pc does it take to get an ounce?


Gold recycling

Does computer chips have 14krt gold inside them?

Are those little pins real solid gold?


You can get more gold out of a used computer than gold ore (rocks with gold in them) compared by oz/weight. It is a good idea to use gold because it is a great conductor (better than silver and copper) and has the advantage of never corroding. It will never rust like iron or turn green like copper.

There is also gold on the connector end of your cellphone (where the charger connects, ect).

They are plated gold, and they are more like pure gold than 14K gold. There's not enough to even scrape them to get a small pile of gold dust. They are like 0.001" thick, if even that. If they were solid gold, there's no way a computer could cost $599. There's plated gold plated on some connectors and card fingers too. Recyclers cut off the gold fingers and the pins to reclaim the gold, but it takes a lot of boards and a lot of processing.

The gold is there because they are a great electrical conductor and doesn't oxidize. Gold plating is also used in some solder plating because it adheres well to copper and solders really well.

On very few processors, they are pure. On most, they are plated. You'd have to process thousands to get a decent amount of gold.
Gold recycling

There is gold in PC chips


There’s gold, silver, copper and several other precious metals inside the chip components that make the cell phones, computers and other electronic devices to work. They’re introduced during the manufacturing phase to connect circuits, complete wiring, etc. They’re present in very small quantities, but if you take many hundreds of recycled cell phones and melt them down you’d come away with a fairly large quantity of gold, a larger quantity of silver, and even still larger quantity of copper, though in terms of value it would be the other way around.

Basically the phones are put into a vat, heated up and, at different temperatures, various metals are extracted. Other materials are burned off, in what I’m sure is an EPA-friendly operation. The return on operations is even greater than real gold mines! According to Yokohama Metal Company Limited (a recycling firm), a gold mine yields 1/5th ounce of gold for every ton of ore processed. With cell phones, 5.3 ounces of gold are yielded for every ton of cell phones processed, as well as 6.6 lbs of silver and 220 lbs of copper. At todays prices, that would be approximately $5,500 for the gold, $1,700 for silver and $870 for copper.

For every ton of discarded cell phones, the return on investment is $8,070 less the costs of processing, which are probably around 70%, meaning about $2,400 per ton, or $1.21/lb. Not bad at all.
Gold recycling