Recycling Motherboard Integrated Circuits

In addition to the CPU, northbridge and southbridge integrated circuits (ICs)
We've got inductors, electrolytic capacitors, diodes, and batteries.
Furthermore,
The typcial plain vanilla desktop PC motherboard has 10-50 separate ICs.

Questions:
1) Is there any way to know what all these other ICs are doing?

2) Do you need to desolder them and identify them based on part/manufacturer #s listed on the IC itself?

3) Does anyone ever desolder these things and save them for resale as separate functional entities? Do they typically survive hot-air-gun or desoldering treatment?

4) Does anyone ever desolder or hot-air-gun treat the inductors, capacitors, and diodes for resale and reuse.

Call me crazy, but I find each of these devices amazing and beautiful in their own way. They have functional, symbolic, historic, and aesthetic beauty. Each, IMO, is way more fascinating and collectible than a coin or a stamp. They just pack more layers of emotional punch IMO -- imagine starting from the ore in the ground, then the refining of the metals, then the assembly into inidividual components, motherboard assembly, shipment across oceans, resale, use, disposal, and now it sits in your hands -- all these years later. Quite an adventure, and quite an amazing history if you ask me.

Sometime I enjoy the most mundane item and mavel at how it was first imagined, then manufactured.

There is a market for some of those chips. The reusable items will be found in the newer computers. There are some chips that can be found in OLD systems that are worth money to people who like to save those kind of things.

Yep, people hold onto things for all kinds of reasons...Just look at the photo below, it proves my point very well...:-)



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That was so wrong.....now I have this and that duke photo burned into my mind!!!!

MY EYES!!
If you pull all the IC chips then you have depopulated the board and you'll have to sell it as a mid-low grade.

Here, this is paybacks for my eyes,

This is just getting mean!!!!

Originally Posted by Mechanic688

MY EYES!!
If you pull all the IC chips then you have depopulated the board and you'll have to sell it as a mid-low grade.

Here, this is paybacks for my eyes,

((photo removed to save eyes))

What he said is right if you go removing the chips but with some buyers they may or may not be as picky. I know with me if you remove one or two chips off a few boards and you are sending a good few...I will just tell you don't worry about it and just put them in there.

One or two chips wont kill a whole batch...but if you go removing ALL or most of the chips then it will become a bigger issue.

Mechanic that was a private picture that was taken of me with part of my back shaved...Where did YOU get it???? LOL

That guy certainly does not need a coat this winter.

Mechanic that was a private picture that was taken of me with part of my back shaved...Where did YOU get it???? LOL

Your wife sent it to me for some reason,,, LOL