Pretty sure it's been said in the past on the forum, but one way to tell how "quality" your fingers/contacts/pins/whatever are is to go by the color. From my experience, shiny and bright is lower yield, duller the better. For (very) roughly testing the thickness of the plating on PCI fingers, run a screwdriver over the length of the contacts. You can get an idea from the feel and even the sound it makes. For comparison, take a couple cards from different eras (one from 80s/early 90s, one from mid/late 90s, one from 2000+) and run your screwdriver over all of them, it's pretty obvious how different they are. But you can usually tell just by looking, once you get the hang of it. It can definitely be worth your while to seperate your fingers if you're selling them on ebay or wherever, most bidders seem to know what they're doing and will bid accordingly.
Same goes for pins, color test works for them but it's much harder to tell the thickness. I can say, though, that taking a pair of pliers to a newer pin seems to strip off some of the plating much easier than older ones, so I suppose that could be a "test" of sorts.
Definitely seperate your pins if you have a lot of them, there's a substantial variance of recovery between eras/brands/types. Regular cheap IDE cable pins are pretty crappy unless they're really old or designed for high end applications.
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