Motherboard Discussion Looking for buyer's responses and other perspectives as well.

I know we had a thread a bit ago discussing the downgrade of some mother boards, but I still have a lot of questions that need to be answered and figure that it is worth a new thread.

Using board sort as an example. They have categorized mother boards based on the size of the CPU socket. Plain and simple. http://boardsort.com/payout.php
They have 2 prices based on this.

My buyer who is fairly local has 2 categories as well. Green and non green.

This is an easy decision, sell all my green boards to my local guy and ship all of my colored boards (red, yellow, purple, etc.) to boardsort or any other buyer from this forum.

The above is all based on gold content of course that has diminished as time goes on as well as lesser content coming from foreign boards. (so we are assuming and I see no reason not to believe this.)

There is of course a kink in this. I have recently come accross some old motherboards. They are yellow. They are old. They have large sockets that had gold cap chips in them.

Now what? Of course I will be contacting my buyer with this question, but wanted to get some other perspectives or information about this. I can almost see down the road ending up with 10 different classifications of motherboards as this business gets bigger.

Thanks to all for any input on this. What classifications does your buyer have?

or sell them to a buyer who buys motherboards as motherboards.

We have been refining them and the colored boards where there before and will all ways be there. I really dont see why everyone wants to change there pricing...we will buy them all as straight motherboards.

This is what I am getting at. Apparently the refiner you sell to has no preference. Some other refiners have noticed a difference in the raw materials and pushing back at their suppliers. Just wanting to get a handle on this whole mess.

Thank you for your input as always, Easy. Much appreciated.

what are you paying for the chinese motherboards? i could get you several tons if the price is right.

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Originally Posted by rbrooks715

what are you paying for the chinese motherboards? i could get you several tons if the price is right.

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I buy those at Motherboard #2 price...I think it is $3.00 per pound right now.

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Originally Posted by rbrooks715

what are you paying for the chinese motherboards? i could get you several tons if the price is right.

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Same as any other motherboard but if you send us a whole lot of cheap grade that wont work...lol they need to be mixed.

so a motherboard is not a motherboard. if you require a certain mix of selective boards to meet a price, then you are using more than 1 price for motherboards. which is what the op was asking.

i will not be surprised to see a 3 grade standard for motherboards by end of 2nd quarter. the chinese boards, the rainbow colored boards, will wind up as a low grade. large socket, small socket and low grade motherboards. some of the buyers have already stopped buying the asian boards.

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Originally Posted by ComputerScrapper

I buy those at Motherboard #2 price...I think it is $3.00 per pound right now.

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that's a decent price compared to the competitors in your area.

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Originally Posted by rbrooks715

that's a decent price compared to the competitors in your area.

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We try to stay competitive as much as possible. Our #2 price is at $3.00 per pound right now. If you would like to sell them then I would be more than willing to buy them.

well, it is a decent priced compared to your competitors in your area. however, it is a bit less than what i am being quoted. and a bit more than i have been paying. but i am not trying to be competitive on these boards.

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Originally Posted by rbrooks715

so a motherboard is not a motherboard. if you require a certain mix of selective boards to meet a price, then you are using more than 1 price for motherboards. which is what the op was asking.

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The thing I do not want is someone only selling the cheap ones sold to us as we will lower the price a little bit, but we will still buy them as motherboards when the lot is a mixed lot.

This is how we see it.....we have been refining boards for some time now....these chines boards where there before along with the colored boards....so why have a new pay scale? I don't know about you but I don't need or want 50 boxes of the same thing, IF (and this is a big IF) the lot is being sold as a mixed lot. In my neck of the woods, many customers I buy from do not want to spend the money on payroll so the lot is one product all the same. So we refine them the same...and pay the same. I just do not want someone sending me a truck load of chines boards if they expect a higher price I might have been paying prior as a mixed lot that contained a "good" mix of all types of boards. For the discerning customer who has separated out the various "different qualities or grades", then yes, this "would be" taken into consideration likewise. However, we do have very satisfied customers, both sellers, buyers and the refineries we work with.

I have reopened this thread at Computerscrapper's request. Please keep it civil.

Alright, lets get this party started....The topic be motherboards and the new classifications that many are finding when reaching out to buyers......Now then, while it is true that every buyer is different, there is one universal truth...Every buyer is at the mercy of their buyer and when things change at that level then it will invariably trickle down the line to everyone.
When it comes to motherboards I thought that something like this was coming....Anyone who looks closely at motherboards can see the major differences between the various types. Grab an old 486 series board and then a Pentium 4 board and it is pretty easy to know the difference. So it becomes apparent that eventually, when the gold fever died down, that things were going to change.

Now I can't say for sure what is going to happen within the industry but I am guessing that eventually all buyers are going to have to do some kind of new sort to stay within the confines of the rules for their buyers.

Alright, lets chew this over....I am itching for a great discussion on motherboards here.

amen to that statement.

Now part of the reason why this all came about (if anyone asks me) is because you have so many buyers out there paying diffident on motherboards and how they grade them. So you had people removing gold fingers and chips or putting this board in with this board and all of this caused the refining of the PM levels change very wildly from batch to batch.

I have had some boards that have been picked almost clean of chips, fingers and so on...this hurts the bottom line big time and I feel this is why there is this new grading going on but I can tell you that at the end of the day all the boards are most likely being mixed and refined in the same box due to refining costs.

They want to pay less for the lower grade boards and pay a little more for the better grade boards. The amount of time this takes in labor is HUGE for anyone who moves some weight in boards.

And when we get back to the original part of this discussion provided by Parrothead we find that some buyers are using completely different systems...The color coding system is rather confusing for many because there are old boards that come in a different color other than green....To me it is kind of a gold color (some refer to it as yellow) and that has thrown off the entire system for a lot of people.

Of course Boardsort has gone a completely different route by specificying CPU socket size....Large socket is considered high grade while small socket is a lower grade...Ok, but there are variations on both sides here....Some of the Xeon processors come with a larger socket, they resemeble a large P4 processor. On the other side of the coin comes the 486 processor...This came in more than one size and one of the sizes is small, so how many people are devaluing their 486 boards with the small socket because of this system?

Still, this does not mean that either of these systems are bad or wrong...They just happen to be what works for those buyers....I am sure that not everyone agrees with the system I use, which has 3 grades of motherboards but at this time it is the best that we have been able to come up with. Our system is based on the actual CPU and goes by age. Of course this means that the person needs to know what CPU came on the board, which can also be a problem.

Solving this issue 100% is probably not in the cards but I would love to hear some other ideas on this as well. We have some great minds on this board so maybe we can really work something out.

Since this whole price change came about it has made us look into other buyers. We have now gone to a multi buyer system. One buyer for green boards and a seperate for colored boards. Colored boards then being broke down by socket size. To the inexperienced socket size can be confusing according to your above mentioned points but in reality it is a age of socket. On a positive aspect, we were able to get better prices on our power supplies, media drives, laptop mother boards, ups systems, and a few other items by doing the new buyer hunt.

The one thing that does bother me is that that green (or large socket) boards wshould be going up in price since we as sellers are doing the work of sorting all the lower grade boards out of the premium boards and having it more common to remove batteries. In essence buyers are getting a better quality product for the same money.

I did enjoy browsing your website and actually finding a price list. There is nothing more frustrating as a seller than not having a pricelist to refer to. Trying to chase people down for pricing and not getting straight answers or answer a question witha question is to time consuming.

That is why we don't follow the system at this time but if its abused we will have to change that. But all large, small or green and color boards to us is the same price. With the information we have in front of us we don't see an issue with "mix" boards. But if someone sends us only color pricing or would like to send us only one type of board they need to send us a e-mail first to find out the pricing that it will be for that.

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Originally Posted by easyrecycle

That is why we don't follow the system at this time but if its abused we will have to change that. But all large, small or green and color boards to us is the same price. With the information we have in front of us we don't see an issue with "mix" boards. But if someone sends us only color pricing or would like to send us only one type of board they need to send us a e-mail first to find out the pricing that it will be for that.

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Would it not be more accurate then to call this your "mixed motherboard" price rather than "motherboard" price? Since as you stated above your expectation is that when someone sends you a load of motherboards at your posted price it will be a mix of everything. I know Ewasted posts only 1 price for motherboards and its called something like that, boardsort who differentiates by socket sizes also offers a mixed board price.

In doing a bit of research last night I noted that some buyers, even some of the major players in the game, have decided to make a completely different category for the so-called "chinese boards" moving them out of the motherboard category all the way around. I have a feeling that we are in for a wild ride over the next several months when it comes to e-scrap in general.

It appears that most of the changes are coming from the end users, the final link in the chain. So like I mentioned previously, those changes are slowly starting to trickle down the line to those in the trenches. When I was first made aware of the entire change to the sort I was told that the board value on "chinese, rainbow, small boards" would be less than half that of the older boards. Obviously that was not the case. Still there is something that I would love to see....A report from a refiner, processor on the actual recovery from a ton of "chinese, rainbow, small" boards. This would give everyone a better idea of what is going on right now.

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Originally Posted by tackleberry

Would it not be more accurate then to call this your "mixed motherboard" price rather than "motherboard" price? Since as you stated above your expectation is that when someone sends you a load of motherboards at your posted price it will be a mix of everything. I know Ewasted posts only 1 price for motherboards and its called something like that, boardsort who differentiates by socket sizes also offers a mixed board price.

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We are not going to rename our grading just because others have. Before all of this new grading they where called motherboards. We are still calling them motherboards, but if we start to see people abuse the system with us we will have to follow all the other e-waste companies and pay less for these boards and move the huge amount of labor cost onto you!

If people keep sending us the same boards the same way (mixed of both good and of the chines boards) then we will not change our grading and we will keep it the same as we have.

easy - what is the difference between your 2.80/lb board and your 3.90/lb board. From a sellers perspective how do we know what price our mb is going to bring

SO, Back to talking about refineries....Currently at my yard we dont see much E-scrap but I want to change that. To get an idea of what im dealing with as far as returns go. If I was to send in 2000lb of motherboards what could i expect? Im talking vague ballpark figure. PM me if you rather be discreet. I'm asking mostly to see about making a ewaste branch in the upstate NY area. Currently there arent many ewaste buyers in this area. Thanks!

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Originally Posted by directrecycle

easy - what is the difference between your 2.80/lb board and your 3.90/lb board. From a sellers perspective how do we know what price our mb is going to bring

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The price will be around the $3.30 mark unless you have alot of metal on the boards and or you go removing chips and other things from the boards (other than memory and cpu...those you can remove). If you have pci and server mixed in with your motherboards I will bump up the price on the lot based on the "mix"


There are so many grades out there...this is why I have a price range...to fit into 99% of all grade levels so people will have a ball park on what my pricing will be.

thanks for the explanation

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Originally Posted by easyrecycle

The price will be around the $3.30 mark unless you have alot of metal on the boards and or you go removing chips and other things from the boards (other than memory and cpu...those you can remove). If you have pci and server mixed in with your motherboards I will bump up the price on the lot based on the "mix"


There are so many grades out there...this is why I have a price range...to fit into 99% of all grade levels so people will have a ball park on what my pricing will be.

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To qualify the statements here Easy....You are speaking of chips that are soldered to the boards when you say "or you go removing chips" correct? Removing chips that are soldered to the boards is similar to removing gold fingers from PCI cards with most buyers. I just wanted to make sure that everyone understands the differences in the boards.

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Originally Posted by ComputerScrapper

To qualify the statements here Easy....You are speaking of chips that are soldered to the boards when you say "or you go removing chips" correct? Removing chips that are soldered to the boards is similar to removing gold fingers from PCI cards with most buyers. I just wanted to make sure that everyone understands the differences in the boards.

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You are right...I should of made that more clear..thanks for pointing it out...but here is a rule of thumb...if you need a tool to remove something....it maybe a good idea not to remove it.