Magann: A PC circuit board, where the gold is, weighs about a pound. If you had a ton of those boards, you should have 5 troy ounces of gold.
Circuits in modern CPUs and Laptops weigh around 100 gm so you can expect to extract 0.150 grams of Gold.
Pour nitric acid into the glass container over the circuit boards. Stir the mixture with the glass or metal rod until the contents become a uniform fluid. Once the gold has separated from the plates — it may take some time — strain the nitric acid from the mix using the filter. Take out the pieces that aren't melted.
While extracting gold from electronics is not without its challenges, it can be worth it for individuals looking to recover valuable metals and reduce e-waste. However, following safety precautions and using personal protective equipment when handling hazardous chemicals is essential.
Motherboards – the biggest circuit boards inside both laptops and desktops – often contain the “mother lode” of gold in used computers. Their edges have gold contacts and connectors where wires slide on. You will also find thin layers of gold applied to motherboards' surfaces.
The United States holds the largest stockpile of gold reserves in the world by a considerable margin at over 8,100 tons. The U.S. government has almost as many reserves as the next three largest gold-holding countries combined (Germany, Italy, and France).
CPUs have a high content of gold – it could be as much as 0.2 g to 0.5 g! Melting and processing of parts from several devices yield up to 1–2 g of gold.
Gold is used in the manufacturing of SIM cards due to it being a very excellent conductor of electricity. Other than this, it is also very durable. However, each SIM card contains very little amount of gold, and you need thousands of SIM cards to be able to extract a few grams of gold.
How much gold is in a computer hard drive? It is possible to find gold plating in small traces, not only in hard drives, RAM memory sticks, but in many other components of desktop or laptop computers. The exact amount can vary around 0.3 gram of gold worth around $20.
“A ton of electronics scrap should contain about 12 ounces of gold . . .”
Gold is found in numerous places on a motherboard: IDE connectors, PCI Express slot, PCI, AGP, ISA, and other ports, jumper pins, the processor socket, and DIMM (SIMM on older motherboards) slots. All of these connectors are often covered with a fine layer of gold a few microns thick, deposited by flashing or plating.
Computer CPU's (processors) have the most precious metal value by weight, followed by Memory (RAM) & Circuit Board Fingers / Connectors / Pins, then Circuit Boards (Motherboards), then cables / wires, with hard drives & whole computers being last.
RD Ram chips? about 5 grams gold per 1 kg. Average mix 3.32 g per kg.
It's estimated that the average desktop CPU contains around 1/5th of a gram of Gold or 200mg. Today's gold prices make the total amount of Gold in a desktop CPU worth about $12.
About 1 to three grams depending on the type and era of the computer pins. The older the donor computers, in general, the more gold you will get.
Gold in iPhones
A typical iPhone is estimated to house around 0.034g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and less than one-thousandth of a gram of platinum. It also contains the less valuable but still significant aluminum (25g) and copper (around 15g).
One of the most expensive minerals used to create your smartphone is gold. Because of its excellent conductivity, gold is commonly used in printed circuit boards as well as other wiring and components. And of course, it's not only found in phones. It's an essential material in many of today's consumer electronics.
TVs usually contain a very small amount of gold that might amount to about $1.00 or less in value. It can be quite a lot of work to get to the gold inside your TV as well.
The processors and connectors in computers, tablets, and smartphones use gold. You can also find gold in televisions, gaming consoles, printers, or essentially anything electronic.
Recovering gold from junk electronics, also called urban mining, may be profitable if you can amass large volumes of electronic waste (e-waste), particularly computer parts. It may not be worth the ordeal to extract gold from a small pile of junk hardware.