[Solved] HOW MUCH GOLD IN A CPU

You aren't seriously considering trying to harvest gold from CPUs are you?

- Edit - Typo

The amount of gold in a CPU is worth less than the CPU all together, even old ones.

So just sell the CPU instead of ruining the chip looking for gold, if you are really that poor then try and get a job.

Or if you don't want to sell it give it to me for free.

There really isn't enough gold in the contacts to make it worth the time and trouble.

I'm not doing it for the money I'm doing it for a hobbie,besides why give it to you so you can sell i

1. It's not worth it.
2. It requires very dangerous chemicals which can harm you.
3. Don't get hurt.

one laughs but I know that people collect old discarded valueless chips for salvage ops. That said the time and patience needed just makes it a drag. I am also certain its not pure gold.

There used to be a fair amount of gold in old wire-bonded chips where gold wires were used to connect the die to package leads. With today's flip-chip BGA packaging, the only gold you may be able to get is from the solder balls which may have ~1% gold in them but can also have none at all.

Plating is easy enough to strip but doing that safely and cost-effectively might be another story. The plating is only a few microns thick so the quantity of gold there is also miniscule.

So yeah, with modern chips, chip-milling for gold is not really worth the trouble.

There are only milligram quantities of gold in a CPU and the gold is coating the pins or lands. Tom's had an article on how to extract gold from CPUs. They used a bunch of VERY nasty chemicals like high-molarity nitric and sulfuric acid ("aqua regia") and got an impure gold BB about the size of a #9 shot pellet from several CPUs. The only way that harvesting gold from CPUs could make a viable business model is if you were paid to dispose of the CPUs and had an industrial-sized operation going on. But even then you better be in some third world country like China because the EPA regulatory compliance costs in using the necessary chemicals would bankrupt you in the good 'ol United States of Attorneys.

Refining gold using mercury algamation is a cheap, quick and dirty way of doing it... some places do not even attempt to recover the mercury they burn off and they burn off hundreds of kilograms of the stuff each day. Good thing some volunteers are showing them how to build reclaimers to reduce the amount of mercury contamination in those gold-mining camps. On the plus side, since properly built reclaimers can recover up to about 95% of mercury, people who got educated into becoming more environmentally conscious of mercury contamination quickly figured out that this simple trick also makes their gold mining a lot more profitable by reducing their mercury expenses by 80-95%.

Not quite up to EPA standards but at least it is a giant step in the right direction.

Burning off even single kilograms of mercury per day is "not quite up to EPA standards" about like saying an Intel 8088 is "not quite up to encoding HD video." The EPA says we can't even SELL mercury to foreign countries because they might emit it into the environment.

But it is much closer than the 200+kg/day those mining camps were burning off before they were shown how reclaimers can drastically improve health, environment and profitability for a very small initial cost.

I personally much prefer knowing that their mercury emissions are dropping than complaining that they do not meet EPA regulations since EPA cannot do jack-squat about it due to being out of their geographic jurisdiction so complaining is unlikely to accomplish anything any time soon.