GOLD HARVESTING IN PC PARTS

Older computer chips, transistors & electronics components from the 1960's & 70's contain the most gold content in general as they were often designed for military and aerospace applications which required them to have heavier gold-plated caps (lids) and leads/pins/connectors which offered the component increased longevity, heat, radiation and corrosion resistance.


 

During the 1990's some early versions of the Intel Pentium Processor, Intel Pentium Pro Processor, and many DEC Alpha had large gold-plated caps,  connector pins, and internally had solid gold wiring making them good candidates for gold recovery.

Up to around 1998, very fine solid gold wiring was used in wire bonding the computer chip (die) to the substrate packaging. Gold wire used in Integrated circuit packaging were typically 99.9% pure gold. All other components (caps, lids, pins  & pads) were only gold-plated. Some manufactures have also used aluminum or copper wiring in the past in place of solid gold wiring to cut material costs.

The Intel Pentium Pro Processor has one of the highest gold contents of any mainstream CPU package from the 1990's to date due to it's much larger package size contributing to a an increased number of gold plated pins and much larger gold plated cap. The Pentium Pro also had two separate chips inside so this doubled the amount of solid gold wire bonding that is usually found in a single chip CPU. Gold refining yields of the Pentium Pro have been reported to be as high as around one gram per CPU.

Modern computer chips manufactured after 1998 have very little gold content in them because most CPU's no longer use solid gold wire bonding technology or gold-plated lids in their packaging.

For example, the Intel Pentium 4 Microprocessor came in an organic (non ceramic) package with a nickle-plated copper lid, & it did not use gold wire internally to attach the silicon chip to it's package. It's only noticeable gold content came from it's connector pins that were thinly gold-plated. However, the pins were gold-plated to a thickness of only 0.76 microns - that calculates to just around a few cents worth of gold value per CPU.

 Depending on their age, computer motherboards and other electronic circuit boards can also contain rich gold content made up of gold-plated circuit traces, edge fingers, connectors, Integrated Circuits, transistors, & memory chips. Before sending your computer motherboards and gold-laden PCB cards to the precious metal recyclers you should make sure to check for their collectible value first. Some of these circuit boards are highly sought after by vintage computer collectors & hobbyists.

Today, a typical organic CPU package is no longer made with connector pins, instead they use thinly gold-plated connection pads which is used to socket the CPU to a motherboard.

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