Article: The Gold We All Search For.

Components from older computer chips, transistors, and electronics of the 1960's and 70's contain the most gold content. Their general purpose was for military and aerospace applications. Due to demanding conditions the components were required to use heavier gold plated caps (lids) and leads/pins/connectors. By using heavier amounts of precious metals the components could have and increased longevity and corrosion resistance.

During the 1990's the best candidates for gold recovery, are the early versions of the Intel Pentium Processor, Intel Pentium Pro Processor, And many DEC Alpha (and similar RISC CPU's). Reason being that these chips had large gold plated caps, pins, and internal solid gold wiring.Very fine solid gold wiring, that typically was 99.9% pure gold, was used in wire bonding the computer chip (die) to the substrate package. Other components such as the cap, lids, pins, and pads are only gold plated. Something to be careful of is some manufacturers have also used aluminum wiring in the past in place of solid gold wiring to lower costs.

The top dog for gold content during the 1990's hands down was the Pentium Pro. It has a large surface area of gold plated pins and cap. Under the cap you will find two separate chips, this doubles the amount of gold present compared to a single CPU.

After 1998 we start to see a sharp decline in gold content of Cpu's. Reasons behind this was manufactures no longer used solid gold wire bonding technology or gold plated pins in their packaging. A good example is, the Intel Pentium 4 Microprocessor, which came in an organic package material with a metal lid and no gold wire. The only gold able to be extracted was from the pins. "The pins were gold plated with a thickness of only 0.76 microns, that calculates to only 0.000176 cc of gold per cpu".

What we can expect from the future is already here and shows the dying age of gold recovery from cpu's. Today's processors have no connector pins, instead using a thinly gold plated connection pad to socket the Cpu to the motherboard.



In the next article I will discuss processors that are worth more then their weight in gold and where some might be found. Happy treasure hunting.

-Dunemaul

Originally Posted by grabinow

Thanks...Almost like a reliable WIKI page

I need to practice for when i head back to college, so i figure I'd share small parts of the data that i have collected over the year. Only thing i can't say is true about the article is the section in quotes, and the big boys aint gonna say if the number is right or wrong.

can you link the orginal source?

Gold value in computer chips - *** Vintage Computer Chip, Semiconductor & Transistor Memorabilia

Thanks Dune...read the rest of article and learned something new today....thanks again.

Yeah im working on using part of the 2nd section of the article and incorporating items that i have found through research that contain the rare chips. I'll probably post it sometime around 5am ish.

Yes it is Julie currently im half finished with the rest of the article and ill finish it when i get the chance. Just been to busy later.

The article contains were to find that exact chip. I been looking for the item they are found in and still no luck.