came across a postr this am that kind of chaps my butt

[EcoSafe]

you e waste buyers out there we nede an indepth description of what is what,
this morning I am reading through an un related post and discover that aparently printer boards are hi grade. I have been throwing them in my lowgrade gaylord. and now it will be almost impossable to resort them. so to me it is a lost few dollars I cant afford to lose.

some how a comprehensive list needs to be developed, so we dont discover things like this as an after thought.

I discovered cd drive boards were mother board grade after discarding most of them and had to go back and resort.



this comprahinsive list would also save you all a bunch of hastle and phone time answerint the same questions over and over. I would even be willing to pay a small fee for such a list, like any other tool.

this mornings discovery raises a whole bunch of questions.

are all brown boards low grade?

what if its brown on one side and green on the other

what if it is green on both sides but no visible gold.

what if it came from a floppy disk but has visible gold

are ALL printer boards hi grade

what are e proms what do they look like

are they worth saving same with the long skinney removable chips

are all the square chips ic chips with or with out writing, what about the ones with the little gold slash in one corner.

I thought I was becomming fairley educated after 3 months at this but I find out every day what a dummey I really am.

[parrothead]

Yes, a sticky with pictures and descriptions. I have been tossing around starting to put something together for some time now, but always fail to find the time. Not just for escrap, but for everything we scrap. A database if you will that can be broken down by category. One for various types of wire, (romex, coax, etc. with nice close ups of the ends), escrap of course, different types of aluminum, brass, and so on. I guess we are looking at a group project.

[EcoSafe]

with shipping beeing .50 a lb it is very important to know exactly what we have. the buyers dont pay the shipping so it is not as important to them. after the cd board fiasco I am marking every board with a majic marker,except of course printer boards I thought were worthless. help us out guys.

[Ballymoss]

what are e proms what do they look like

Here are a couple of pics of Eproms.





The one with the round window on the top usually has a paper sticker over the window to stop the light getting in and erasing its memory.
These Eproms are definately worth collecting from Escrap as many have Gold or Silver inside them.
I always pull them off my boards and never get penalised on payment when i send the boards in.

Buzz

[Ballymoss]

are all the square chips ic chips with or with out writing, what about the ones with the little gold slash in one corner.

The ones with the little Gold slash in the corner all have Gold inside.
They are commonly known as Flatpacks.

Again, i remove all my flatpacks before sending my boards in and don't pick up a penalty for doing so.
I've been a member of the Gold forum for years and have learnt how to process these and get the Gold.
However, they do sell for top dollar on eBay if you don't want to get involved with the chemicals.
Just load up with a couple of KG's and sell them on.

Just tap them with a sharp chisel and they come off very easily.

Buzz

[Mechanic688]

I can tell you on the printers, if they have small slots in the front of the printer where small memory cards go in then they have memory onboard and are considered hi grade.
See the small slots in the upper right of these printers, those are memory card slots. The slots might also be on the lower part of the printer depending on the make and model.

[EcoSafe]

next questions w3ould all rectangular chips e proms reguardless weather they are removable or not and reguardless of size.

2 do all flat packs sell seperately and the ones with out the bold slash are they also called ic chips or are they different and of different value.

[rca987]

I know low grade boards snap easily in half, is there a low grade board that doesn't? Like for instance a MB if bent in half wouldn't snap very easily in comparison to a brown board...Is this a way to distinguish the two?

[Ballymoss]

next questions w3ould all rectangular chips e proms reguardless weather they are removable or not and reguardless of size.

Eproms are nearly always removeable, at least the ones i've seen have been.

Those rectangular chips that are soldered onto the boards tend to be standard IC chips.
These i leave on the boards. Whilst there are precious metals inside them, there is not enough to justify
the work needed to remove them (in my opinion anyway) and you would probably turn a high grade board into a medium grade.

2 do all flat packs sell seperately and the ones with out the bold slash are they also called ic chips or are they different and of different value

I treat all flatpacks the same, Gold flash or not.
Flatpacks are the ones that are green squares that appear to be "glued flat" onto the board. They don't have the little legs down the sides like eproms do.

The ones that appear on eBay tend to be mixed batches too (Gold flash/no Gold flash/size) so i would say that it's ok to mix them together when selling.

Buzz

[Ewasted]

Not all printer boards are high grade. Our cut off is printer boards, typically from Laserjets that have memory slots on them, will be included into the motherboard pile. However if we receive a large volume of these, several hundreds of pounds, we wouldnt include them ALL into the mothergrade mix as it would put us at greater risk of a lowered assay.

I understand you are frustrated and would like an entire list of what is what, etc. The problem is with millions of types of boards it would be impossible to really make a comprehensive list. Also different buyers categorize things differently. There may be some boards that some guys mix in with a grade that we can't. Since we are refinery direct we can't take that risk since we are paid on the recovery.

This is where you need to find a buyer that really knows their stuff. This is where we excel with 7 years of experience. We have customers bring material in and we will upgrade their pay on alot of the low or mid grade boards based on experience.

[PartTimeScrapper]

Ewasted then can we ship you say 50 pound box of mixed boards and you will sort them for us and pay the correct price?

[Dru702]

From what I have read, All brown boards are low grade, some but not all green boards are mid grade and also some are high grade (if they have many gold bearing objects they are mid grade or high grade), mobos and severs boards are high grade as is RAM (unless is encased in metal or rumbus as ewaste buyer call it) and the boards off hard drives, floppy drives, and cd/dvd drives are all high grade as well. IC chips are any black square or rectangle chips attached to the board with pins (not 100% sure about this but still pretty sure) and they current sell for around 6$ a lb. The square black chips that are attached to alum on the board is either brass or copper. And from what I understand if you remove the IC chips some ewaste buyers will not buy the boards. I'm certainly no expert on ewaste but all this info I gathered from experts.

Edit:
I do have lots of experience with computers just not scrapping them, I was an IT Tech at a server hosting company before I was a scrapper, and If you guys come across any RAM that is encased in metal that is 512 MB or more they are most certainly worth more than scrap. The metal the are encased in is usually alum and the reason they are encased is for better cooling. RAM encased in metal is extreme performance RAM that is designed to operate at much faster speeds/timing than regular RAM and as such they generate more heat and are more expensive, about 2x or 3x as much as regular RAM. If you come across any RAM that has a heat sink on it it could be worth 4x or 5x as much as normal RAM.

Here are some pics for reference:

This is high performance RAM


And this is REALLY high performance RAM




Also any hard drive that is more than 100 Gigs is worth more than 10x more scrap. And any Video cards with a fan on them and 512 MB of memory or more are high performance as well and worth 10x more than scrap. A used video card with 2 fans on it will easily sell for at least 30 - 40.

This is an example of a high performance Video Card



Pretty much any computer that is less than 3-4 years old is probably worth more than scrap.

[Ewasted]

Ewasted then can we ship you say 50 pound box of mixed boards and you will sort them for us and pay the correct price?

Yes.

[jaydisco]

I have a related question on pcmcia card cages from laptop motherboards...are they left on? What are they worth on their own /lb? I have a nice little box of them but don't know what to do with them. If this is too unrelated to this thread, i apologize.

[Mechanic688]

what if it came from a floppy disk but has visible gold

Olddude, I don't think this question got answered in all the confusion. If you want to take the time to remove the little board then it goes with the CD/DVD boards. Our buyer bought the whole floppy drive, and we hauled them to the buyer with our load we took. It was not worth the time for us to break them down, their not as easy as the cd drives. If you have to ship your e-scrap then you might want to break them down to save needless weight.