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.
