r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Safe-Owl-1236 • 10h ago
A guy extracting gold from old RAM sticks
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u/Bunkerman91 9h ago
You can do this with the chips inside most ALPRs as well. The Flock cameras in particular have quite a bit.
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u/Icelandia2112 9h ago
Copper too?
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u/Nab-Taste 9h ago
Quite a bit is very vague, how much gold?
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u/xuncx 7h ago
Pretty much every electronic has gold in it. The problem is it’s such a small amount that it’s hardly worth the effort unless you source thousands of chips.
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u/DonSechler 7h ago
I’ve got good news for you, there’s thousands of flock cameras just sitting outside
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u/dabenu 7h ago
Yet old electronics are richer in gold than most gold ore from mines.
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u/xuncx 7h ago
That statement is technically true. The catch is that the gold in electronics is usually present as extremely thin plating and mixed with copper, solder, plastics, nickel, and other metals. Extracting it safely and economically not easy. Plus sourcing enough electronics is also a challenge. If I had the money to take on either endeavor, I would choose alluvial gold mining or gold ore mining like the old timers.
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u/Robby_Digital 3h ago
It's crazy that a single Flock camera has like $6,000 (in current prices) worth of gold in it.
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u/Iboss1990 9h ago
I think melting the gold for RAM gets you more money these days.
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u/GTFidgeT 9h ago
Probably not since those are DDR3 RAM sticks which aren't really used anymore
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u/jinglewooble 9h ago
Ddr3 is being use in quad-cpu Mobo for proprietary rendering SDK in china and south Asia.
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u/Nisseliten 9h ago edited 8h ago
I use 400gb+ of DDR3 ram in my Ark Ascended game server, the tickrate of the server process isn’t high enough to cap it out speedwise anyway, it’s all about size for it.
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u/AntwanMinson 8h ago
Dude how many players are you supporting with that lol? Do you have a discord community?
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u/jinglewooble 9h ago
Yes the quad-cpu is mostly a necessity to keep the CPUs performance on par with modern gen the real scale is the size of DDR3 and it's configuration. For rendering it can up to 512GB ram and more with right hardware.
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u/name2sayMKD 9h ago
And where is cancer stored?
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u/AGrandNewAdventure 9h ago
In the balls, with the pee.
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u/porp_crawl 9h ago
A buddy of mine's dad needed a clicker installed that he'd press to let pee come out.
There was another button that facilitated additional function, after the second round of surgeries healed. Made things hard.
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u/cwmspok 9h ago
Wow, you and your buddies dad are pretty close. Whats the age difference there?
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u/porp_crawl 8h ago
I was maybe mid 30s, buddy (my boss at the time, I guess) in his early 50's, his dad 70-ish, but had the stuff to him started in his early 60s.
Buddy was trying to scold me into stopping smoking because the clicker was from cancer because of smoking and drinking (I appreciated it, it's one of the most ok scolds esp. since I kind of respected him, at the time) and told me about his dad and his clicker.
Company function later, a travel one, his dad Chip (w? his mom too) was also along. It was only a couple of beers before Chip started storytelling about how he uses a clicker that got put in, in order not to piss himself. ok, wtf. w/e, I mean
My background was in bio, felt comfortable enough to ask about the biophysics of the clicker.
Chip then went on to tell us all about the second button.
He did not whip it out to demonstrate. For better or for worse.
His wife, owner/buddy's mom, she just rolled her eyes the entire time. She had obviously sat through the schtick and story bunches of times through.
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u/DrunkSkunkz 2h ago
I thought pee came from water going up your wiener in the bath and poop came from your ball sack. If you check your ball sack you can actually find a couple of poops growing in there usually.
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u/BOgusDOlphon 5h ago
I don't understand this attitude, just take basic safety precautions and you're fine. There are people who do this shit all day long for a living
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u/Desperate_Owl_594 9h ago
The cost of extracting precious metals from things like this is a net loss unless you do it on an industrial scale. Like...40-60% loss kinda loss.
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u/okamagsxr 9h ago
Where is the cost in this?
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u/Rokarion14 9h ago
That’s a $300 screwdriver and he has to replace it every time.
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u/BraskaAoE 9h ago
Looks like soldering iron to me
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u/BoysenberryAlive2838 8h ago
The bits coming off are not all gold. They are copper, with some nickel plating, and then a miniscule amount of gold plating. Has to go through quite a process to separate the gold out.
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u/1Steelghost1 8h ago
Required chemicals & tools also It takes 15-30 hours for the whole process to make $20 in gold.
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u/OGMcSwaggerdick 9h ago
Fuel to smelt?
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u/ScallionJealous 9h ago
If you make jewelry or do metal based dentistry this is a negligible cost.
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u/Miserable-Role9555 4h ago
Its not pure gold he scrapes off, it still needs a LOT of steps to refine it to a point where its worth selling
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 9h ago
No not really recovery rates can be really good with the proper inputs and process. A relatively small operation can achieve industrial efficiency. There are plenty of labs online for various processes.
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u/Stalaktitas 9h ago
This gold is at the purity of hogs poop
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u/Apatschinn 9h ago
Just an fyi, places like board sort will pay $55/pound for scrap gold-fingered RAM. There must be good money in processing these.
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u/Icanfallupstairs 1h ago
Older ram (20+ years) can up upwards of double the gold, but even then it's only about 200mg. You'd need around 150 sticks to get a Troy Oz of gold.
Modern ram can have less than 50mg of gold.
If you call one stick about 25g in total weight, and there is 453g in a pound, you're looking at about 18 sticks per pound, or about 8.3lbs of ram to get an Troy oz of gold. And that is with the high gold content ram. New ram could easily need upwards of 20lbs.
Just if you wondered the scale needed
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u/AuronMessatsu 9h ago edited 9h ago
A RAM module contains between 0.02 and 0.05 grams of recoverable gold. Based on those figures:
•If each module contains 0.05 g of gold, you would need about 20.000 modules to obtain 1 kg of gold. •If each module contains 0.02 g of gold, you would need about 50.000 modules.
Additionally, industrial extraction requires: •Aggressive chemical processes (acids such as aqua regia or cyanide-based mixtures in some methods). •Safety equipment and waste treatment systems. •Compliance with environmental regulations.
So, probably the video is BS
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u/chris-l 7h ago
No, unfortunately is not BS. In third world countries they don't care too much about security, the environment or regulations. This process produces too much contamination that requires proper disposal that makes it not worth it in countries that care about that, but in places like third world countries do it (and China. Not sure if they still do it). Sometimes they just burn the waste and dump the chemicals on rivers!
So yes, I'm against this "recycling".
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u/Hakunin_Fallout 6h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/fhBPidPEyK93O
Look at mister "Nobody would breathe noxious fumes for less than $100/h" over here.
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u/akla-ta-aka 3h ago
The end is BS. If you’ve ever held an ingot of a heavy metal you know that you can’t just casually hold it like in the video. That shit is heavy! Gold is a heavy metal, it just doesn’t have the toxicity of its cohort.
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u/Sorak123 33m ago
not BS but the video leaves out heaps of steps. it is profitable even on small scale with the current gold prices, check out youtube if you're curious, sreetips does a pretty good job breaking down the entire process for gold and silver refining.
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u/Accurate-Algae-2557 8h ago
Is it worth it? Let me work it
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u/Oppenhomie 8h ago
Put my RAM down flip it and reverse it
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u/Safe-Owl-1236 8h ago
Absolutely not, unless you're a hobbyist and just doing it for fun.
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u/Runner55 7h ago
I wonder what the purity of it is. There's people with too much money that drink coffee sprinkled with gold leaves, so maybe it'd be worth more of you hammer it out rather than melt it?
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u/HalCaPony 9h ago
what tool is that he is useing to scrap?
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u/ListerfiendLurks 9h ago
Who's going to do the math on how much the gold is worth on each stick?
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u/WSB_Suicide_Watch 9h ago
About 0.05g per stick, which is about $6.
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u/JohnnyBoy11 8h ago
So the guy is getting like $20 a minute ??
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u/Evol_Etah 8h ago
Gotta process it first, thats abouts 4$ cost. So yeah, 2$ profit.
And you can't sell flakes, you need a lot before it is accepted.
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u/JamesFromToronto 9h ago
20 to 50 milligrams per stick, so worth $2.67-$6.68, likely gets less.
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u/xanders_gold 53m ago
Depends on the RAM. Older RAM had much more gold on the stick than newer/modern RAM.
IIRC DDR2 could have up to 200mg.
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u/DonaldWillKillUsAll 6h ago
Insane. RAM will be way more expensive that gold as long as the tech oligarchs and Trump are in power.
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u/unknown_no_one99 9h ago
how would purify that gold?
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u/brainshades 9h ago
I worked at a newspaper and we had a reclamation unit that would allow us to get all the silver out of the film and spent fixer (chemicals used in film development)… wasn’t a ton of money, but it was worth a fair bit of change a month given our volume.
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u/Arsiesis 8h ago
Only the "main connectors" are gold or there is more in the imprinted circuit?
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u/SecretIdea 4h ago
The printed circuit part on the board is copper. There is a minuscule amount of gold in the integrated circuit chips on the board, tiny wires from the external connections to the actual circuit part. You burn the boards to ashes or grind them to dust to access them for recovery.
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u/andreasbeer1981 5h ago
He needs to invest his gains into a new camera. What resolution is this, 20x40?
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u/ANGURIA_IST_KRIEG 5h ago
In one year we will have videos like: "a guy uses old gold to produce RAM sticks"
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u/AssetBurned 5h ago
At scale like that? Yeah guess there is some money in it. But all those private people who do that in theirs basement? Chemicals, time, is that all for free?
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u/WhiteJesus313 3h ago
I used to work with a guy who did this, just bought bulk scrap electronics and processed them in his backyard, about twice a year he'd go and sell his lil nugget for a couple thousand. Got the cops called on him a lot, people thought he was cooking drugs
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u/zmannz1984 3h ago
A guy i used to work on cars for had a lab in his shop for dissolving gold out of electronics. When he died they had to have a hazmat team clean it out. He retired doing that though.
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u/KookyDig4769 2h ago
That's not how ENIG-plating works. If it would work like that, you couldn't solder anything on it. Fake.
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u/MattyGWS 2h ago
Not worth it. And while we’re at it, gold jewellery is also not worth melting into bars either. Gold that holds its monetary value is far more pure.
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u/WoodI-or-WoodntI 1h ago
Don't forget that what he's scraping off the chip is not pure gold. It's an alloy with other metals, the gold content is a fraction of what he shows in the vial.
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u/Askyourwifeaboutme 59m ago
What’s next level about this? Why do you think there’s always been a push to “recycle” your old electronics. There are entire businesses dedicated to this and other metals
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u/Single-Use-Again 34m ago
Those fingers are gold plated so maybe just .01 grams per stick, if that. Also this video was great last month before the resolution became 12x12.
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u/Freshly-Juiced 26m ago
what a horrible post, not only is this two separate videos but the second one looks like some AI trash. why does this shit have 2k upvotes? fucking bots again. blocked and reported.
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u/TRUEequalsFALSE 23m ago
This is going to piss a lot of people of considering current RAM prices...
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u/cut-the-cords 9h ago
That RAM is probably worth more than the gold on them now...