Green Motherboards VS. Colored "Chinese" Motherboards

What is the difference between green and Chinese motherboards? Do colored ones really have less gold content? Is this just a myth that is perpetuated by refiners to pay you less for your material?

As some of you may know I started an electronics recycling division within my company to diversify and try to make up some of the margin that we were losing on steel when a half dozen yards decided to put in a shredder and royally screw up the profit margins in this area.

So now we have a couple of truckloads of scrap and after shopping it around I decided to go with a company that pays the same for "colored" and "green" motherboards. Some of their prices on other commodities are a bit lower, but I figured I can make that up in motherboards.

Do your e-scrap buyers pay the same for all motherboards? Or is this just a scam like "light copper" (most yards in my area are able to ship it as #2)?

I have had the same thoughts, but we DO get a lot of inferior junk out of china, (no pun intended)

bu the way I had a gitlfriend who once worked at the famous chicken ranch in Nevada, she told me that the junk from China wasen't the only thing inferior. just my ,02

Every time you buy something, in case you haven't noticed, it is inferior to the last time you bought the "same" item. This is not only true at the grocery store, where last weeks 0.99 - 7oz bag of chips has became this weeks 1.79 - 3oz "new and improved" ones which taste rather funky due to the cheaper ingredients. It is also true with everything else on the shelves, including computers, and their "new and improved" inferior internal components. I have no clue why this has happened, but have heard stories which mentioned "unbridled corporate greed".

In other words, the answer to your question is a definitive, resounding, Y-E-S! They are cheaper in every possible way that the human mind can possibly imagine in making them that way. You only need hold up an 80s IBM, made in USA board, beside a 2012 hoo.askt.yoo board, to see very definite differences. Far as precious metals go, they're not only in less places, and on less components, they are undoubtedly lighter and thinner in any way they could conceive in making them that way. (just my 02 ; )

Thanks for the responses thus far. The reason this question arose is because I was wondering how one of my buyers can afford to pay the same price for all motherboards when virtually every other buyer differentiates between the two. Some of their prices for boards are higher and some are a little lower than other buyers, but for all intensive purposes they all pay the same to a company like mine doing our kind of volume. How do you think that my buyer can still pay such a premium for colored motherboards and come out on top? I'll preface by saying that my buyer is a HUGE worldwide company and e-waste probably doesn't make up half of one percent of their company.

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Originally Posted by BohemianLush

How do you think that my buyer can still pay such a premium for colored motherboards and come out on top?

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You will not likely get an answer on this, but you hit the nail on the head. It doesn't add up.

I personally prefer one who will differentiate between the two. I'm well aware where the lines are between them, and I believe most buyers who do differentiate, place that line between the pentium 3 slots, and the pentium 4 sockets.
As far as AMD sockets, etc., you'll need another definitive point of reference, because I really can't tell you there. You might find a clue by studying their respective CPU pricing, and looking for which type CPUs have the enormous price drop?

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Originally Posted by AuburnEwaste

You will not likely get an answer on this, but you hit the nail on the head. It doesn't add up.

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I believe you'll find a number of buyers who list different pricing, 1-green boards, 2- rainbows? and 3 mixed

It sounds like they are buying to resell not for recycling as in pm recovery. Could be going back overseas to where they originated from to be refurbished and resold in " new machines". We buy all the other garbage that gets sent our way.

Bear, my comment was in regard to why some buyers pay the same price for all motherboards. I meant he would not get an answer as to why some can pay the same price for Chinese boards and still make a living.

I believe you'll find they pay less AE, for the "mix"?, I mean the ones I've looked at do. Even the ones who do not differentiate the two in their pricing, are generally paying less for mixed, than the places who differentiate are paying for sorted green ones. (from what i've seen anyway)

I'm surprised you didn't research this prior to purchasing gaylord quantities of E-scrap. Yes, there is a major difference but you need to look at the deal in the other direction. Your buyer will most likely be getting 8088, 8086 and probably some telecom in the mix. In quantity, they can yield a profitable average. Its the same principle as the sample a refinery takes to do an assay. If you have a large enough quantity and sort it well enough you develop a homogenous mix or average.

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The reason this question arose is because I was wondering how one of my buyers can afford to pay the same price for all motherboards when virtually every other buyer differentiates between the two.

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I know of one buyer that tries to average as far as what he's buying. He pays the same for all boards as long as there is a good mix of green boards there. Now if you dump a load of all colored on him then I'm sure the prices would be adjusted.

This is an excellent topic,

Thanks for bringing it up.

I have found some buyers will pay the same price for rainbow and and older p3 boards,

I've also found some buyers that will pay different on three basis,
1.Rainbow,
2.P4 boards not made in china
3.P3 and earlier

I understand that most P4 and Rainbow are from china, however, I've found a bunch made in the us only to be
put with the chi boards, is it really the socket that determine the value then.? More pins or the thickest of the pin socket. Like Pent pro sockets are big in pin sizes versus 478 p4 socket

so, yeah.. not sure.. and have not figured out why the difference.

Thanks for sharing the topic,

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Originally Posted by bnbsfsd

This is an excellent topic,

Thanks for bringing it up.

I have found some buyers will pay the same price for rainbow and and older p3 boards,

I've also found some buyers that will pay different on three basis,
1.Rainbow,
2.P4 boards not made in china
3.P3 and earlier

I understand that most P4 and Rainbow are from china, however, I've found a bunch made in the us only to be
put with the chi boards, is it really the socket that determine the value then.? More pins or the thickest of the pin socket. Like Pent pro sockets are big in pin sizes versus 478 p4 socket

so, yeah.. not sure.. and have not figured out why the difference.

Thanks for sharing the topic,

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The "rainbow" boards you speak of are most likely Asus type boards, with yellow swirls. These boards have a higher precious metal content than a true "rainbow" (blue,red or any color other than yellow swirl)

Both the color of the board and the size of the socket does not directly determine the "value" or precious metal content of the board. It is simply an easy way for a buyer to grade the precious metal content thus the yield of that particular board.

The three major metals that determine the value ie. the yield of a board are gold, palladium and copper. The only way to determine the yield of a particular class of board is to collect, sort and pay to have a proper assay performed by a refiners lab. This is one of the major expenses necessary for a buyer or collector to undertake in order to determine our profit margin.

To answer the initial question, a board manufactured in the 70's, 80's and early 90's will yield in some cases 10 times the precious metal content when compared to a late model board.

The simple reason this has become a current issue, there are less and less older model boards and more and more pin less processor boards being collected and it is now skewing the overall average as I discussed above.

i know of three shredders in the Denver metro area, where are the others if I may ask?

Pete

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Originally Posted by BohemianLush

Thanks for the responses thus far. The reason this question arose is because I was wondering how one of my buyers can afford to pay the same price for all motherboards when virtually every other buyer differentiates between the two. Some of their prices for boards are higher and some are a little lower than other buyers, but for all intensive purposes they all pay the same to a company like mine doing our kind of volume. How do you think that my buyer can still pay such a premium for colored motherboards and come out on top? I'll preface by saying that my buyer is a HUGE worldwide company and e-waste probably doesn't make up half of one percent of their company.

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I believe you answered your own question with your original post.

Some of their prices on other commodities are a bit lower, but I figured I can make that up in motherboards.

They are making it up on the other stuff.

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Originally Posted by PartTimeScrapper

I believe you answered your own question with your original post.

Some of their prices on other commodities are a bit lower, but I figured I can make that up in motherboards.

They are making it up on the other stuff.

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Maybe I wasn't clear in the original post...I did a cost analysis. We are coming out waaaaay ahead. When I said they are paying less for some commodities I meant that they are $0.30 lower on finger boards than some other quotes I got. However, we can mix our gold RAM, silver RAM and RAMBUS all together and they pay me $17 a lb.!!! So that alone would offset a miniscule $0.30 a lb.

To be clear we have 10,000 lbs. just in motherboards that we are sorting. If you figure that half are colored and half are green. The rough average that other companies quoted me for green MB's was $4.50 and for colored it was $2.00. That means there is a $2.50 difference in price x 5,000 lbs.= an extra $12,500 we will make off this truckload.

My buyer recycles everything...including plastics. Do you think that the plastic/ferrous/nonferrous content on the board is value that most buyers don't factor in or capitalize on? And if so does it have enough value to justify that price gap?

And just to reiterate...this is a reputable company that I am dealing with, and I have established a good relationship/report with my buyer. Just thought that I would throw that out there before people think that I am some schmuck getting scammed because I actually believe that there is someone out there that would pay $17 a lb. for gold/silver RAM mixed together.

And it has occurred to me that this company is probably reselling/reusing some of these commodities. For those of y'all that resell some of this stuff...do you really get that much more than scrap value? I guess I can see you could in some ways. We came across a dozen or so video/sound cards still in the box that I looked up and retail for several hundred dollars. However, at this point we aren't looking to start a retail store to sell this stuff. And if we did I would send it to KZBell to sell on consignment!

Ill give you 2 examples of better than scrap value that you can make right now since we are in the same town. It takes on average 23 sticks of ram to make a pound. I pay $2 for each 1gb stick of ram that would be $46 a pound. Granted thats if they each check out good. Second hard drives. Any hard drive 80gb or more I will pay between $1.50 and $10.00 each. The average hard drive weighs 1.25 pounds and I think the most any buyer on the forum pays for them is $1.10 per pound. So scrap value on whole hard drive is $1.37 on average.

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Originally Posted by Bear

Every time you buy something, in case you haven't noticed, it is inferior to the last time you bought the "same" item. ... It is also true with everything else on the shelves, including computers, and their "new and improved" inferior internal components. I have no clue why this has happened, but have heard stories which mentioned "unbridled corporate greed".

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I can speak to this.

It's not a matter of lower quality, it's refinement of design, and better design tools, plus better materials utilization.

The design of circuitry in the 70s and 80s was done on paper. There was a tendency to over-engineer components because going through multiple iterations of the design process was extremely costly -- things had to be completely redrawn. Testing was far more expensive because it couldn't be done virtually -- someone had to hand-build a board to test it.

With the advent of CAD, design costs started to slowly decrease. There were opportunities to be had to reduce costs by engineering more precisely. This went hand-in-hand with the computer design methods facilitating design iterations. You didn't draw it once and hope for the best, you drew it once, tweaked it multiple times, tested it virtually, made adjustments, tested again, etc. Traces started getting smaller, components started getting smaller, material costs started getting lower, and the electronics manufacturers started getting more profitable.

Now anyone who can remember suffering with Windows 3.1 on a machine designed for MS-DOS, or Windows 95 on a 386 can tell you that "new and improved" is just exactly that. Remember how slow that 486 junk was? I wish I had a nickle for every minute I've spent watching a computer reboot for work. I'd be a wealthy man.

Yes, the components are far less expensive, and that's a very, very good thing for the consumer. I now have multiple computers in my house instead of just one, and I can afford to assign them to different tasks. Our current 3-year-old home computer would have been considered a super computer and a national asset guarded by government troops if it existed in the 1970s. You couldn't have had that machine for a million bucks -- and remember, that's when a million bucks was real money.

So yeah, today's computers aren't worth quite as much as scrap as the ones of yesteryear. Oh, well. It doesn't make them inferior, not by a long shot!

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Originally Posted by ggariepy

Now anyone who can remember suffering with Windows 3.1 on a machine designed for MS-DOS, or Windows 95 on a 386 can tell you that "new and improved" is just exactly that. Remember how slow that 486 junk was? I wish I had a nickle for every minute I've spent watching a computer reboot for work. I'd be a wealthy man.

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Ha! funny...I had that problem when I tried to shoehorn 3.0 on a dos box. what a mess. then 3.1 came along was worse until I sorted it out....then 3.1 was my fave, I knew what every single file did. deleted all the extraneous stuff, put in a math co and a bunch of ram and my 386 hummed! Came with a 125 MB HDD which everyone at the time said was bigger than I'd ever need. Biz partner at the time bought a 486 and it was exactly as you say...reboot! I made a living using that souped up 386 until 1998. By then I had external drives and a bazillion floppies. Chucked it all a few years later. Wish I hadn't done that. BTW that monster was $2700 new. And I dabbled in parts at that time, sold used HDDs for $1 per MB. One time bought a pallet full of used 386 motherboards (not computers, just the boards) at an auction, sold a few, made a small profit. The rest sat and sat in my garage. Boxes of 'em, falling off the pallet. Once the pentium came out I took them to the landfill. I was glad to be rid of them. Hmmm.

Anyway, thanks for rebooting the memories! :)

Not sure where to start. I would have to say that they are shipping overseas. That would be the educated guess, theres not much margin (if any) if they are paying $4.00lb for mother boards of all sorts. We dont even do that and we are secondary refinar if you decide to refine will you get that price (you should get better). That market should dry up soon. Not everyone can pay high prices and expect to stay in business for vary long no matter how long they have been in business. We are all in business to make money and stay in business.
The next thing is are the certifed do they have the ability to show downstream for all of your boards and other items you send. (to most it wont matter) If you happen to land a large account and they ask you for yoru downstream vendor paperwork and they see their items going overseas you could have very well lost a good account.

I will always advocate my company and how we do business because it keeps businesses here it keeps jobs here and it keeps our information here not overseas somewhere where they can get to your, mine, or their personal information.

I don't know of any business that shows another business their business to get business.

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Originally Posted by ggariepy

I can speak to this.

It's not a matter of lower quality, it's refinement of design, and better design tools, plus better materials utilization.

The design of circuitry in the 70s and 80s was done on paper.

So yeah, today's computers aren't worth quite as much as scrap as the ones of yesteryear. Oh, well. It doesn't make them inferior, not by a long shot!

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I chopped the middle, cause it was kinda windy.
Yes, I very well remember those days. Drawing prints, using a TI calculator, pencils, and ink. And no, CAD hadn't even been thought of, and yes, 50 36" wide pages only covered one phase, and when it needed a change, even those electric erasers could take awhile.
I was basically addressing the OPs question about PM content. And it has most definitely declined, along with most everything else.
There was a time when we strived to build things "better", not just "shinier", or "faster", but better! Today the dominant factor is "cheaper", and that one has certainly been aced.
Temporary as that may be, until of course, tomorrow's "new and improved" once again rears it's ugly head, and you're packing yet another non working item back into its "original package"(hopefully you saved that? because they don't want it otherwise), to be returned for replacement(haha, IF! you bought the, new and improved, "extended", for more than 7 days, "limited", warranty) , hoping the next one you get will, hopefully, be a working unit, for, at least, a little while ; )

I know to get some certifications you can only do business with others that have that certification or meet other requirements, mostly it is so big business only does business with big business. I don't know how far back the requirements go.

I think that ddelatorre is referring to being R2 certified so that the people that you do business with can audit your downstreams if they need to. The company that I am dealing with has R2, Rios and several ISO certifications. Therefore, I know they aren't shipping the stuff overseas and I don't have to worry any nefarious business practices.

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Originally Posted by BohemianLush

I think that ddelatorre is referring to being R2 certified so that the people that you do business with can audit your downstreams if they need to. The company that I am dealing with has R2, Rios and several ISO certifications. Therefore, I know they aren't shipping the stuff overseas and I don't have to worry any nefarious business practices.

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Being that I am very familiar with R2's certifications and requirements, there is nothing to prohibit a company from doing business "overseas". In fact the notion that a company as large as SIMS Metal management or Waste management one of which I'm pretty certain you've contracted with, could function on a day to day basis without filling and shipping containers is ridiculous. R2 doesn't even prohibit shipping e-waste to developing countries.

The way I look at mother board issue is just like the case of the computer.
The old case are thick steel and are heavy. The new cases are VERY thin and light.
They both work, and the new ones are much easyer to move around (sucks for scrapping)

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Originally Posted by ron22

The way I look at mother board issue is just like the case of the computer.
The old case are thick steel and are heavy. The new cases are VERY thin and light.
They both work, and the new ones are much easyer to move around (sucks for scrapping)

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?? what

What I ment is thing get made cheaper less material in them
Old Computer case have still. New ones realy thing steel. Made cheaper but still work just as good or better.
Mother boards are made cheaper because then can and they still work.

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Originally Posted by Bear

Every time you buy something, in case you haven't noticed, it is inferior to the last time you bought the "same" item. This is not only true at the grocery store, where last weeks 0.99 - 7oz bag of chips has became this weeks 1.79 - 3oz "new and improved" ones which taste rather funky due to the cheaper ingredients. It is also true with everything else on the shelves, including computers, and their "new and improved" inferior internal components. I have no clue why this has happened, but have heard stories which mentioned "unbridled corporate greed".

In other words, the answer to your question is a definitive, resounding, Y-E-S! They are cheaper in every possible way that the human mind can possibly imagine in making them that way. You only need hold up an 80s IBM, made in USA board, beside a 2012 hoo.askt.yoo board, to see very definite differences. Far as precious metals go, they're not only in less places, and on less components, they are undoubtedly lighter and thinner in any way they could conceive in making them that way. (just my 02 ; )

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I'll second that,i have quit going to a lot of places i used to eat, cause every bite ya take,you know if there was anything in the world cheaper to put in that food,thats what you would be eating instead of the current cheap ingredients.

Back in the 80's and 90's the price of gold was about 400.00 per troy oz. today gold is over 1700 per troy oz. If they made computers the same way today as they did in the 80's or 90's we would be paying 2000.00-3000.00$ insted of 500.00 or 600.00$. And we all would be complainning about how expensive the computers are.

what you mean people still buy real computers, all ive seen people buying is icrap

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Originally Posted by happyscraper

Back in the 80's and 90's the price of gold was about 400.00 per troy oz. today gold is over 1700 per troy oz. If they made computers the same way today as they did in the 80's or 90's we would be paying 2000.00-3000.00$ insted of 500.00 or 600.00$. And we all would be complainning about how expensive the computers are.

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The price of gold has little to do with the cost of manufacturing semiconductors. Computers used to cost more then they do today because it was profitable for everybody in the industry and there were tons of people taking a cut in thousands of companies. Remove the profit and the finished product is cheaper, of course many people out of work can't afford it anymore but CEOs don't care about people anyway.