Green Motherboards VS. Colored "Chinese" Motherboards

What is the difference between green and Chinese motherboards? Do colored ones really have less gold content? Is this just a myth that is perpetuated by refiners to pay you less for your material?



As some of you may know I started an electronics recycling division within my company to diversify and try to make up some of the margin that we were losing on steel when a half dozen yards decided to put in a shredder and royally screw up the profit margins in this area.

So now we have a couple of truckloads of scrap and after shopping it around I decided to go with a company that pays the same for "colored" and "green" motherboards. Some of their prices on other commodities are a bit lower, but I figured I can make that up in motherboards.

Do your e-scrap buyers pay the same for all motherboards? Or is this just a scam like "light copper" (most yards in my area are able to ship it as #2)?

Every time you buy something, in case you haven't noticed, it is inferior to the last time you bought the "same" item. This is not only true at the grocery store, where last weeks 0.99 - 7oz bag of chips has became this weeks 1.79 - 3oz "new and improved" ones which taste rather funky due to the cheaper ingredients. It is also true with everything else on the shelves, including computers, and their "new and improved" inferior internal components. I have no clue why this has happened, but have heard stories which mentioned "unbridled corporate greed".

In other words, the answer to your question is a definitive, resounding, Y-E-S! They are cheaper in every possible way that the human mind can possibly imagine in making them that way. You only need hold up an 80s IBM, made in USA board, beside a 2012 hoo.askt.yoo board, to see very definite differences. Far as precious metals go, they're not only in less places, and on less components, they are undoubtedly lighter and thinner in any way they could conceive in making them that way. (just my 02 ; )

Thanks for the responses thus far. The reason this question arose is because I was wondering how one of my buyers can afford to pay the same price for all motherboards when virtually every other buyer differentiates between the two. Some of their prices for boards are higher and some are a little lower than other buyers, but for all intensive purposes they all pay the same to a company like mine doing our kind of volume. How do you think that my buyer can still pay such a premium for colored motherboards and come out on top? I'll preface by saying that my buyer is a HUGE worldwide company and e-waste probably doesn't make up half of one percent of their company.

Originally Posted by BohemianLush

How do you think that my buyer can still pay such a premium for colored motherboards and come out on top?

You will not likely get an answer on this, but you hit the nail on the head. It doesn't add up.

I personally prefer one who will differentiate between the two. I'm well aware where the lines are between them, and I believe most buyers who do differentiate, place that line between the pentium 3 slots, and the pentium 4 sockets.
As far as AMD sockets, etc., you'll need another definitive point of reference, because I really can't tell you there. You might find a clue by studying their respective CPU pricing, and looking for which type CPUs have the enormous price drop?

Originally Posted by AuburnEwaste

You will not likely get an answer on this, but you hit the nail on the head. It doesn't add up.

I believe you'll find a number of buyers who list different pricing, 1-green boards, 2- rainbows? and 3 mixed

Bear, my comment was in regard to why some buyers pay the same price for all motherboards. I meant he would not get an answer as to why some can pay the same price for Chinese boards and still make a living.

I believe you'll find they pay less AE, for the "mix"?, I mean the ones I've looked at do. Even the ones who do not differentiate the two in their pricing, are generally paying less for mixed, than the places who differentiate are paying for sorted green ones. (from what i've seen anyway)

I'm surprised you didn't research this prior to purchasing gaylord quantities of E-scrap. Yes, there is a major difference but you need to look at the deal in the other direction. Your buyer will most likely be getting 8088, 8086 and probably some telecom in the mix. In quantity, they can yield a profitable average. Its the same principle as the sample a refinery takes to do an assay. If you have a large enough quantity and sort it well enough you develop a homogenous mix or average.

This is an excellent topic,

Thanks for bringing it up.

I have found some buyers will pay the same price for rainbow and and older p3 boards,

I've also found some buyers that will pay different on three basis,
1.Rainbow,
2.P4 boards not made in china
3.P3 and earlier

I understand that most P4 and Rainbow are from china, however, I've found a bunch made in the us only to be
put with the chi boards, is it really the socket that determine the value then.? More pins or the thickest of the pin socket. Like Pent pro sockets are big in pin sizes versus 478 p4 socket

so, yeah.. not sure.. and have not figured out why the difference.

Thanks for sharing the topic,

Originally Posted by bnbsfsd

This is an excellent topic,

Thanks for bringing it up.

I have found some buyers will pay the same price for rainbow and and older p3 boards,

I've also found some buyers that will pay different on three basis,
1.Rainbow,
2.P4 boards not made in china
3.P3 and earlier

I understand that most P4 and Rainbow are from china, however, I've found a bunch made in the us only to be
put with the chi boards, is it really the socket that determine the value then.? More pins or the thickest of the pin socket. Like Pent pro sockets are big in pin sizes versus 478 p4 socket

so, yeah.. not sure.. and have not figured out why the difference.

Thanks for sharing the topic,

The "rainbow" boards you speak of are most likely Asus type boards, with yellow swirls. These boards have a higher precious metal content than a true "rainbow" (blue,red or any color other than yellow swirl)

Both the color of the board and the size of the socket does not directly determine the "value" or precious metal content of the board. It is simply an easy way for a buyer to grade the precious metal content thus the yield of that particular board.

The three major metals that determine the value ie. the yield of a board are gold, palladium and copper. The only way to determine the yield of a particular class of board is to collect, sort and pay to have a proper assay performed by a refiners lab. This is one of the major expenses necessary for a buyer or collector to undertake in order to determine our profit margin.

To answer the initial question, a board manufactured in the 70's, 80's and early 90's will yield in some cases 10 times the precious metal content when compared to a late model board.

The simple reason this has become a current issue, there are less and less older model boards and more and more pin less processor boards being collected and it is now skewing the overall average as I discussed above.

i know of three shredders in the Denver metro area, where are the others if I may ask?

Pete

Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

I believe you answered your own question with your original post.

Some of their prices on other commodities are a bit lower, but I figured I can make that up in motherboards.

They are making it up on the other stuff.

Maybe I wasn't clear in the original post...I did a cost analysis. We are coming out waaaaay ahead. When I said they are paying less for some commodities I meant that they are $0.30 lower on finger boards than some other quotes I got. However, we can mix our gold RAM, silver RAM and RAMBUS all together and they pay me $17 a lb.!!! So that alone would offset a miniscule $0.30 a lb.

To be clear we have 10,000 lbs. just in motherboards that we are sorting. If you figure that half are colored and half are green. The rough average that other companies quoted me for green MB's was $4.50 and for colored it was $2.00. That means there is a $2.50 difference in price x 5,000 lbs.= an extra $12,500 we will make off this truckload.

My buyer recycles everything...including plastics. Do you think that the plastic/ferrous/nonferrous content on the board is value that most buyers don't factor in or capitalize on? And if so does it have enough value to justify that price gap?

And just to reiterate...this is a reputable company that I am dealing with, and I have established a good relationship/report with my buyer. Just thought that I would throw that out there before people think that I am some schmuck getting scammed because I actually believe that there is someone out there that would pay $17 a lb. for gold/silver RAM mixed together.

And it has occurred to me that this company is probably reselling/reusing some of these commodities. For those of y'all that resell some of this stuff...do you really get that much more than scrap value? I guess I can see you could in some ways. We came across a dozen or so video/sound cards still in the box that I looked up and retail for several hundred dollars. However, at this point we aren't looking to start a retail store to sell this stuff. And if we did I would send it to KZBell to sell on consignment!

Originally Posted by Bear

Every time you buy something, in case you haven't noticed, it is inferior to the last time you bought the "same" item. ... It is also true with everything else on the shelves, including computers, and their "new and improved" inferior internal components. I have no clue why this has happened, but have heard stories which mentioned "unbridled corporate greed".

I can speak to this.

It's not a matter of lower quality, it's refinement of design, and better design tools, plus better materials utilization.

The design of circuitry in the 70s and 80s was done on paper. There was a tendency to over-engineer components because going through multiple iterations of the design process was extremely costly -- things had to be completely redrawn. Testing was far more expensive because it couldn't be done virtually -- someone had to hand-build a board to test it.

With the advent of CAD, design costs started to slowly decrease. There were opportunities to be had to reduce costs by engineering more precisely. This went hand-in-hand with the computer design methods facilitating design iterations. You didn't draw it once and hope for the best, you drew it once, tweaked it multiple times, tested it virtually, made adjustments, tested again, etc. Traces started getting smaller, components started getting smaller, material costs started getting lower, and the electronics manufacturers started getting more profitable.

Now anyone who can remember suffering with Windows 3.1 on a machine designed for MS-DOS, or Windows 95 on a 386 can tell you that "new and improved" is just exactly that. Remember how slow that 486 junk was? I wish I had a nickle for every minute I've spent watching a computer reboot for work. I'd be a wealthy man.

Yes, the components are far less expensive, and that's a very, very good thing for the consumer. I now have multiple computers in my house instead of just one, and I can afford to assign them to different tasks. Our current 3-year-old home computer would have been considered a super computer and a national asset guarded by government troops if it existed in the 1970s. You couldn't have had that machine for a million bucks -- and remember, that's when a million bucks was real money.

So yeah, today's computers aren't worth quite as much as scrap as the ones of yesteryear. Oh, well. It doesn't make them inferior, not by a long shot!