http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK9LvMKKIQ8

I watched a few other videos pertaining to this. I was curious if others have attempted to remove gold from computers, or know anyone that does this? I have a lot of computers and CPUs sitting around that are no good, and this might help with getting more profit from scrapping these things out.

I'm not sure you'll make a whole lot from this but go for it.

Well, a friend dumped around 20 desktops on me, plus I have broken printers and a few laptops that are no longer any good, so I thought it might be interesting to try and get what I can.

I'm mostly looking to see if anyone has done this or know someone that does this, and see if there are any pointers that the person in the video failed at providing.

It takes many toxic chemicals, and the amount of gold that you actually get is minute (not to mention that you don't get it in anything like bar or solid form). It's definitely not worth your time to try it, in my opinion.

My thoughts were the same until he said he had 20 desktops. I still don't think that would get you a lot, but I wouldn't mind seeing just how much it is. I guess it really comes down to how comfortable you are working with those chemicals.

Yeah, I've heard the same that KermM said. Can you sell the RAM on ebay? It seems like you'd get more money selling them to people who wanna hack on them anyways. On the other hand, the idea of getting gold from a computer is pretty cool.

This process probably uses Mercury to bond and extract the gold. Then heating the gold/mercury (amalgam) mixture to 700 degrees F to evaporate the mercury. Have fun! (; It would probably be easier to sell em on ebay.

No. Don't do this unless you want heavy metal poisoning.

Seriously. Just don't.

Yeah this is a terrible idea unless you are really into chemistry and know what you are getting into. And only expect to end with a big mess to clean up, rather than a pile of money.

The amount of gold is minute. The guy in the linked video seemed to assume that the gold color he was seeing meant that the whole part was gold. But usually it's just an extremely thin layer of gold deposited for a better connection between parts that can be plugged in somewhere.

There are so many other chemicals mixed in with the source material that the cost of processing will always come out much higher than the refined gold, unless you are a big company that can do it on a massive scale (and even they need to sell the other materials to make a reasonable profit).

I break down circuit boards sometimes to get spare parts. It's a miserable job just doing that, requiring a bunch of hours of tedious work with a heat gun while wearing thick gloves and heavy-metal respirator.

Doooooooooooom.

And that part is just desoldering interesting components so that you can reuse them in your own circuits; you don't take apart the individual components. That reminds me, I need to build myself a fume extractor for soldering and desoldering; my current method of trying not to breath in the soldering fumes is not very healthy.

*bump* Although I hesitate to post this for fear that people (not you) will use the information without proper safety precautions, here's an article that I ran across on the subject in question:
http://hackedgadgets.com/2013/08/24/gold-scrapping-from-electronics-is-popular/

Just to reiterate this is terrible for your health, and a waste of time.

I am too lazy to actually make my own post so instead I quote people and then don't say anything new