No, not really, especially if you're dealing with stuff 1990 and newer. The gold is minimal and takes too much work and time to be worth it.

If you happen to come across some boards though, tantalum caps can go for a pretty penny, as do transformers and electromagnets (lots of copper and magnets are cool). Variable caps are nice to have around too.

Heat sinks are a good source of aluminium too, They go for about 80 cents a pound.

So I should look out for those old big power blocks from the old computers like Sinclair, Commodore and Amstrad used to make?

>>945477

A friend of mine runs a computer store and harvests all this stuff, after a year of collecting he told me the pay off was so low he no longer accepts e-scrap.

Because gas is so cheap they do the processing in china now so the price has plummeted as they ship tons of it overseas.

>>945485

So really the only benefit would be collecting metals for your own hobby projects

>>945477
>oh look it's this thread again
Only practical/profitable on a large industrial scale which is why you don't have a cottage industry doing this in their garages.

>>945483
you probably make more money from them if you action those off to collectors on ebay

for gold etc, circuid boards are paid different amounts based on the type, eg if they have plated contacts.

most money is made from old ceramic cpus

>>945498
only practical use for old mobos is a few caps / diodes

psus are neat tho

>>945940
CRTs tend to have some high-frequency components, and some high voltage components as well.

I actually build old PCs for research and just nostalgia.

Taking advantage of software to change stuff like memory timings, software overclocking, using new software on old systems to give them some use, etc. I have a hard on for computer architecture, and collecting has been a fulfilling hobby.

>>946059
When I was in college (2011ish) I went around to all my local thrift shops and pawn stores and bought every CRT they had for under $7. Took truck loads of them home, desoldered the bigger caps out and was able to make a profit of about $12 per TV selling them on eBay. The hardest part was writing the listings for caps that had no English markings or designations. I kept a bunch of the transformers for experiments and whatnot since they almost never sold. Most have melted, shorted, or gotten thrown away since then.

>>945477
Unless you have a cheap (read free) source of e-scrap with high yield, it's better to just do it as a hobby here and there. You can make money, but the amount of time and processing it takes to extract and refine the gold is not worth it unless you're doing it in bulk. Over the years, I've pulled the gold contacts/fingers/pins off boards before I get rid of them, so I have about a pound of pins, and probably 25lbs of scrap pcb fingers in bags waiting to be refined. I'm gonna do it myself just to get a nice bead of gold, and because I do enjoy the actual chemistry of it. Haven't done it yet because I need to build a ventilation hood/box for my hotplate and get a few larger beakers to hold the material as I dissolve the undesirables with nitric acid.