Pour nitric acid into the glass container over the circuit boards. Stir the mixture with the glass or metal rod until the contents become a uniform fluid. Once the gold has separated from the plates — it may take some time — strain the nitric acid from the mix using the filter. Take out the pieces that aren't melted.
Use Nitric Acid
If you have a circuit board with gold plating, you can remove the gold using nitric acid. The acid will dissolve the metal and leave the non-metallic components of the circuit board intact. Be sure to wear goggles and gloves when working with nitric acid, as it can cause chemical burns.
While extracting gold from electronics is not without its challenges, it can be worth it for individuals looking to recover valuable metals and reduce e-waste. However, following safety precautions and using personal protective equipment when handling hazardous chemicals is essential.
Magann: A PC circuit board, where the gold is, weighs about a pound. If you had a ton of those boards, you should have 5 troy ounces of gold.
Circuits in modern CPUs and Laptops weigh around 100 gm so you can expect to extract 0.150 grams of Gold.
Computer CPU's (processors) have the most precious metal value by weight, followed by Memory (RAM) & Circuit Board Fingers / Connectors / Pins, then Circuit Boards (Motherboards), then cables / wires, with hard drives & whole computers being last.
Gold is used in the manufacturing of SIM cards due to it being a very excellent conductor of electricity. Other than this, it is also very durable. However, each SIM card contains very little amount of gold, and you need thousands of SIM cards to be able to extract a few grams of gold.
In fact, computer parts contain the most gold. It is possible to recover gold from computer boards; it is also possible to extract gold from motherboards, integrated circuits, contacts, pins and printed circuit boards.
Panning works best when gold is coarse and well liberated. Under right conditions, panning can produce high grade concentrates or even liberated gold. Then miners can employ gold recover methods such as direct smelting (described below), although many panning operations lead to directly recoverable gold.
Removing Gold Using Fire
Use steel tongs to turn over the burning circuit boards. Get a metal bin or tray, and put the circuit boards into it. Break the boards into smaller pieces so they burn faster. Light the boards on fire.
What to do: Hold the magnet up to the gold. If it's real gold it will not stick to the magnet. (Fun fact: Real gold is not magnetic.) Fake gold, on the other hand, will stick to the magnet.
Mining circuit boards for gold can be more valuable than mining much of the highest grade gold mine ores given the generous gold plating in electronics scrap. One ton of computer and laptop circuit boards are estimated to contain 40 to 800 times more gold than one metric ton of gold ore.
TVs usually contain a very small amount of gold that might amount to about $1.00 or less in value. It can be quite a lot of work to get to the gold inside your TV as well.
The processors and connectors in computers, tablets, and smartphones use gold. You can also find gold in televisions, gaming consoles, printers, or essentially anything electronic.
Gold is found in numerous places on a motherboard: IDE connectors, PCI Express slot, PCI, AGP, ISA, and other ports, jumper pins, the processor socket, and DIMM (SIMM on older motherboards) slots. All of these connectors are often covered with a fine layer of gold a few microns thick, deposited by flashing or plating.
SIM cards: About one ounce of pure gold, worth about $1,700 can be recovered from 2,000 SIM cards.
RD Ram chips? about 5 grams gold per 1 kg. Average mix 3.32 g per kg.
Things You Should Know
Use scissors to cut just above the line. Do not cut into the gold or metal part of the SIM card.
All hard drives contain precious metals such as gold, silver, platinum and Palladium. While they contain precious metals in very little amount, they still have a value.
Selling the Metals
You can also sell the Motherboards, RAMs, CPUs, PCIs, Gold fingers and other gold plating parts online. Be careful in dealing with online vendors. Selling these items on eBay is a good idea as it normally pays more than what you can get from a scrapyard.