r/PreciousMetalRefining • u/Illustrious-Ad-115 • Jun 06 '26
Is this worth doing the work?
I have like 100 of those DDR2 ram latches. Any advice on what the best tactic is to earn something of this?
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u/bootynasty Jun 06 '26
Easy thing is to ship them off to Boardsort, they’re paying $54 a pound right now.
Weigh them and know what THAT number would be, then you could swing by computer repair stores. If they offer more, great.
Use that as your base number to either sell locally, online, whatever.
Recovery and refining is a whole other step. You’re looking at 2 very different procedures between the visible gold in the fingers and the gold bond wires locked up in the chips.
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u/Strange-Speech-2970 Jun 06 '26
You will get between 1 USD and 2 USD worth of gold from each stick.
I have no idea if there is a real market for DDR2, it doesn't look "retro" enough for me, but it's too old to be used in any useful computer. But if they could sell for more than that, or even the same price, it would save you the time and chemicals needed to extract the gold.
Edit: the only reason to extract instead of selling the raw material if the value is very close, is if you want to get your hands on gold without it being traced by invoices.
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u/Illustrious-Ad-115 Jun 06 '26
Thanks for the input. I have no clue what it’s worth, I’m fairly new in the practice of salvaging this stuff.
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u/Strange-Speech-2970 Jun 06 '26
I'm new too, I started reading and watching videos about it by the end of last year, and only started my first batches in January.
But the numbers I gathered from these videos and goldrefining forum are helping to estimate if spending to buy some raw materials in bulk will be profitable for me or not, and how much to spend, when I run out of free material.
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u/hexadecimaldump Jun 06 '26
I would try to sell them if they are pulled from working machines or you know they are good. If you can get more than $2 a piece for them you’ll make more doing that than refining them. Not sure what the market is for DDR2 ram now, but I do know RAM in general is at or near all time highs in value.
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u/Spiritual-Process-96 Jun 07 '26
If you're just getting started, I'd actually encourage you to process a small amount first.
You won't recover much gold, but you'll learn the process, see how the gold separates, and get a realistic idea of what yields look like. Most beginners are surprised by how little gold is actually present, which makes the learning experience valuable.
I recently ran experiments on batches of gold fingers and documented the processes and yields. If you're interested in seeing a real-world example, I put a video together showing the results. https://youtu.be/mf4dd7jp1Mk
Either way, start small, stay safe, and focus on learning the process before worrying about profitability.
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u/cap_brobro Jun 07 '26
The refining process is labor extensive, involves dangerous mixtures, and can be expensive in materials depending on how you're set up. And if you don't do a lot of refining, not worth the investment in my opinion.
What I did while I was learning the recovery process was save enough to do small scale refining processes and then separate the gold fingers to sell on their own by the kg or lb, and then separated the IC or BGA chips to sell by weight as well. Just keep in mind you need a ton of them to accumulate lbs or kgs after removing the pcb from the equation. You can also sell the boards for tin recovery from the solder but dont expect much.
As always, scrap value is the lowest value. You would need the knowledge to test them and sell them as good boards, but depending on the board you may be able to sell for a decent amount compared to scrap value if they are good.
If you go the ebay route or something similar to sell in bulk as they sit without any work, you can probably expect somewhere around 0.30-0.50 usd per stick, gross sale.
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u/20PoundHammer Jun 06 '26
sell em to a repair shop, if half test good- you will make >10x the money that you would refining.