So how much gold is really in these CPU pins?

[Stanley_Kubrick]

So i got this fool here who is telling me that these O.G. pentiums have solid gold pins if you can believe this...
I know there is a certain amount of gold in these things, but logic says that if there were enough to melt down and harvest that someone out there would be doing it already.

Is anyone doing this? How much gold are we talking about?

[MacGyver]

Total hogwash. They might be gold plated, but not solid gold. Anything made of solid gold is extremely soft, and since CPU pins usually have pressure applied to them (when you push the socket handle down) they couldn't be solid gold.

There's more value selling the CPU used than trying to salvage trace metals from it!

[ShadowWynd]

First, electricity usually only flows on the outside of a conductor. A braided cable can carry more electricity because of the more complex(and larger) surface area, and a thicker cable can more because it has a larger diameter, and hance more surface area.

For CPU pins, it is a straight cylinder, and very small. There is no reason to make the whole pin out of gold, since the gold in the center is wasted.

Pure gold is rarely found anywhere. Even gold jewelry is mixed with lesser metals to make it hard. A pure gold ring, for example, would get nicked, scratched, gouged, and mutilated in a very short time. A ring made from pure gold could be deformed by a person of good muscle tone. As anyone who has dropped a CPU chip can tell you, the pins are pretty resilient to damage and bending. Most certainly not pure gold.

Gold is malleable, which means it can be hammered by beating or by pressure of rollers, extended or shaped down into a thin gold sheet or film. A piece of 24k gold of mass 31.1 grams can cover 68 square feet (0.0001 inch thin). Something can also be gold-plated, in which a very thin layer of gold is electrochemically attached to the base metal.

Using the above figures, (if we assume a pentium chip uses a whopping 4 square inches of gold leaf)by my calculations, the guy would need over 2400 pentium chips to reclaim his 31.1 grams of gold. If we say that the gold is 1/64 inch thick (which would be really, really thick) the same block of gold (9801 in^2) would cover 62 in^2. even at this rate, it would take 15 chips to get the 31.1 grams of gold back (assuming the high rate of 4 in^2 of sheet gold per chip).

At the current exchange rate of 1 ounce gold = 270 dollars, 31.1 g ~ 1.09 oz, so roughly about $324.

I would assume the gold is much thinner than 1/64, but could not find anything saying for certain. Reclamation and refining costs are gonna be a pain in the posterior. Cheaper and easier to go mug old ladies.

[Gollo]

[quote]Originally posted by ShadowWynd:
<strong>First, electricity usually only flows on the outside of a conductor. A braided cable can carry more electricity because of the more complex(and larger) surface area, and a thicker cable can more because it has a larger diameter, and hance more surface area.

For CPU pins, it is a straight cylinder, and very small. There is no reason to make the whole pin out of gold, since the gold in the center is wasted.

Pure gold is rarely found anywhere. Even gold jewelry is mixed with lesser metals to make it hard. A pure gold ring, for example, would get nicked, scratched, gouged, and mutilated in a very short time. A ring made from pure gold could be deformed by a person of good muscle tone. As anyone who has dropped a CPU chip can tell you, the pins are pretty resilient to damage and bending. Most certainly not pure gold.

Gold is malleable, which means it can be hammered by beating or by pressure of rollers, extended or shaped down into a thin gold sheet or film. A piece of 24k gold of mass 31.1 grams can cover 68 square feet (0.0001 inch thin). Something can also be gold-plated, in which a very thin layer of gold is electrochemically attached to the base metal.

Using the above figures, (if we assume a pentium chip uses a whopping 4 square inches of gold leaf)by my calculations, the guy would need over 2400 pentium chips to reclaim his 31.1 grams of gold. If we say that the gold is 1/64 inch thick (which would be really, really thick) the same block of gold (9801 in^2) would cover 62 in^2. even at this rate, it would take 15 chips to get the 31.1 grams of gold back (assuming the high rate of 4 in^2 of sheet gold per chip).

At the current exchange rate of 1 ounce gold = 270 dollars, 31.1 g ~ 1.09 oz, so roughly about $324.

I would assume the gold is much thinner than 1/64, but could not find anything saying for certain. Reclamation and refining costs are gonna be a pain in the posterior. Cheaper and easier to go mug old ladies.</strong><hr></blockquote>

[Jeff the Brit]

I suspect that the pin coating is even thinner than you think. It's not there for conductivity purposes, but to provide an oxidation-resistant surface. Maybe 1/1000 of a millimetre? Gonna need Intel's entire CPU production till the year 3000 to be able to retire on the proceeds of gold salvage !
At one time there was good money to be made from stripping old mainframes and recovering gold from the circuit boards. IBM were more generous with the yellow stuff in those days.

[IT Len]

Got this from an aerospace engineer I know who works on guidance microcomputers...

"Gold plated connectors are usually specified to have a layer three atoms thick..."

[Stanley_Kubrick]

LOL, i knew this chump was full of it, but he didn't want to believe me, the tech.

Thanks for the data, I will print this thread and ram it up his arse when i next see him...

[TrackMan]

Anyone read the book Inside Intel? REal good, it's a history of the company.

Anyways, a part of it tells about how they caught this guy guy taking advantage of the fact that a little bit of gold was used in CPU production. Of course, he couldn't get it from the CPU:s themselves. His job was to clean the machines that applied it, and he stole a little bit each day.