Taking Apart a Desktop: 67 Percent of the Weight, 12 Percent of the Money

Take apart a 21 pound office desktop and the sorted parts come to roughly $15 at published buyer rates. The steel case is 14 of those 21 pounds and accounts for $1.85 of the $15. The RAM, the processor and the hard drive board together weigh a third of a pound and are worth $6.20. Sold whole and unsorted, the same tower fetches a few dollars.

Scrap Price Today market analysis, written from exchange settlement data, mill and refiner pricing practice and published policy documents. Figures are examples; today's numbers are on the live scrap price board.

That inversion is the entire subject. E-scrap is the one material where weight tells you almost nothing about value, which is why the sorting instructions matter more than the price list.

Open the case: what comes out, and what each part fetches

Working in the order you would actually remove them, using published buyer rates for each grade.

Read the first and last rows together. Two thirds of the weight produced 12 percent of the money.

Now read rows seven to nine. Three tenths of a pound, about 1.4 percent of the tower by weight, produced $6.20, or 41 percent of the value.

The grade ladder buyers actually use

These are the names on a real price list, roughly in order. Knowing them is what separates a fair quote from a shrug.

• Trimmed gold fingers: $50 to $60 a pound, the highest common e-scrap grade.
• Hard drive boards: around $24 a pound, often with a small sorting fee.
• Memory chips and gold finger RAM: $12 to $15 a pound.
• Finger boards, meaning boards with the gold edge connectors intact: around $10.50 a pound.
• Mid grade high boards: around $6.25 a pound.
• Mid grade boards: around $3.25 a pound.
• Clean green motherboards: $1.30 to $1.75 a pound, dropping to $1.25 with heatsinks still attached.
• Peripheral and router boards: around $1.00 a pound.
• Mixed or damaged board lots: $0.80 a pound or below, and sometimes refused.
• Incomplete laptops: around $0.40 a pound. Complete ones, $0.60 to $0.75.

The spread from top to bottom is over a hundred to one. No other scrap category behaves like this.

Why older boards beat newer ones

Counterintuitively, a board from an older machine is usually worth more per pound than a board from a recent one.

Gold plating was applied more liberally when gold was cheaper, so large-socket boards from earlier generations carry thicker plating and more discrete components. Modern small-socket boards use thinner plating and more efficient but less valuable alloys.

A motherboard commonly holds 0.2 to 0.5 grams of gold, concentrated in the edge connectors, the processor socket and the memory slots. Age, brand and interface generation all move that number, so older does not automatically mean richer, but it usually does.

Ceramic processors with gold caps and pins from early generations are in a different league again and are traded as their own grade rather than by the pound with everything else.

What is not worth your time

Being honest about this is more useful than another list of things to save.

• Keyboards, mice and speakers. Almost no metal value and a lot of plastic.
• Cases beyond scrapping them as light iron. Do not spend time cutting them up.
• Chasing the gold yourself. A board holds a fraction of a gram, and home recovery uses aggressive acids to get less than a refinery does, as our note on gold in a phone works through.
• Complete laptops that still work. A functioning machine is worth many times its scrap value, and $0.40 a pound is what you get for destroying that option.
• Optical drives, unless you pull the small high grade board inside.

Volume changes the rate, sometimes by double

One published rate structure shows populated boards at $0.29 a pound for a small shipment against $0.58 a pound for a truckload. Same material, twice the price.

That is the reason a household quantity of e-scrap is awkward to sell. The rates in this article are what buyers pay for sorted, consistent lots, and a single tower is neither. If you have one machine, the realistic options are a certified recycler or a retailer take-back, both covered on our page about recycling electronics.

If you accumulate, sort as you go into the grades above and sell when each pile is worth the trip. That is how the numbers in the table become real money rather than an interesting calculation.

Before any of this: the drive

Wipe or destroy the storage before the machine leaves your control. This is not a footnote.

The hard drive board is one of the most valuable parts in the tower at around $24 a pound, so there is an incentive to remove it, and removing it is not the same as sanitising what is on the platters. Sanitise first, then harvest.

For business equipment, use a vendor that issues a certificate of destruction and a chain of custody record rather than a drop-off that gives you nothing.

What this metal pays around the world

Scrap is a global market priced in US dollars, but what reaches a seller depends on trade position, freight to the nearest consumer and how many buyers compete locally. The table below converts the same grade into each market’s own currency and units at the day’s exchange rate, and shows the factor we apply.

How we produced this, and one limitation in our own data

Component weights are typical figures for a standard office tower and vary widely; a gaming machine with a steel full tower, a large air cooler and a high wattage supply can weigh twice as much, most of it in steel. Weigh your own before treating any total as a target.

Board grade rates are taken from published buyer and mail-in programme price lists rather than from our own series, because we do not publish a board price. Light iron, aluminium and insulated wire come from our own daily board, documented on the editorial policy page.

One honest caveat about that board: we carry an indicative electronic scrap grade derived from copper, and it is designed for board material rather than whole devices. Applied to a complete tower, which is two thirds steel case by weight, it overstates what a yard would pay. We have used the component grades here instead, and we would rather flag that than quietly produce a flattering number.

Metal prices in the table are live figures from the board, and the scrap value index covers the rest of the house on the same basis.

Where this goes in other countries

The route depends on which national system covers you. Most markets place the duty on producers and retailers rather than on households, which is why free drop-off points exist at all. The table below sets out the system, the rule that creates it, and the official locator for each market we cover.