Most yards cannot assay boards, so they grade everything as one mixed category. Enter what you actually have and this shows both numbers, plus whether shipping is worth it at your volume.
| Grade | Rate per lb | Your lb | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold-edge RAM sticksThe highest rate here by a wide margin. Pull them before selling the board. | $20.00 to $28.35 | — | |
| CPUs, mixedCeramic chips from the Pentium Pro and 486 era hold up to 0.5 g of gold each; post-2010 plastic averages 0.1 to 0.2 g. | $2.90 to $4.10 | — | |
| High-grade server boardsDense gold and large sockets. The grade refiners actually want. | $10.00 to $14.00 | — | |
| Vintage large-socket motherboardsBoards from the 1990s and earlier carry thicker gold plating than modern equivalents. | $3.00 to $10.00 | — | |
| Modern desktop motherboardsStrip the CPU and RAM first; that alone can raise a lot by over 300 percent. | $1.25 to $3.15 | — | |
| Clean green boards, heatsinks offRemoving steel heatsinks moves a board up from mid-grade for no cost. | $1.65 to $1.85 | — | |
| Mid-grade boards, heatsinks onThe heatsink is dead weight that drags the whole board down a grade. | $1.10 to $1.40 | — | |
| Incomplete laptopsLow yield per pound. Worth stripping the board out if you have the time. | $0.35 to $0.45 | — | |
| Power supply boardsCopper value only. Never box these with motherboards. | $0.12 to $0.18 | — |
Rates are published 2026 buyer sheets and vary by grade, condition, volume and region. A general yard without a PCB assay grades everything as mixed circuit board at $0.20 to $0.50 a pound, which is the comparison shown. Never ship under about 15 lb: freight and assay overwhelm the payout. Not offers to buy.
Why nobody pays gold spot
Boards genuinely contain precious metal, and recyclers cite them as holding 40 to 800 times more gold than equivalent ore. But a pound of ceramic CPUs holds about 10 grams of gold, worth roughly $650 at spot, and buyers pay $2.90 to $4.10.
That gap is not margin. Acid, labour, safety and waste disposal consume 60 to 80 percent of theoretical value, and the rest covers yield risk and freight. No legitimate buyer prices per gram of contained gold.
So the useful question is never how much gold is in it. It is which buyer, at which grade, for what volume.
The two steps worth more than everything else
Pull the CPUs and RAM. Stripping them can raise a lot's value by over 300 percent. Gold-edge RAM reaches $28.35 a pound against $1.25 to $3.15 for the board it sat on, and the difference is an afternoon with a screwdriver.
Sort into separate boxes. Refiners reduce payouts by 18 to 27 percent on mixed shipments because they re-sort before assaying. Putting $10 server boards in the same box as $0.15 power supply boards prices everything near the bottom.
The checkbox above applies that penalty so you can see what mixing actually costs on your own material.
Never ship a small lot
Below roughly 15 lb, freight and assay fees overwhelm the payout. Assay verification runs $0.15 to $0.35 per kg and is usually waived only for repeat shippers above 100 kg a month.
For small mixed quantities a local aggregator is the honest answer even at the lower rate, because the alternative is spending an afternoon on material worth less than the afternoon.
Test before you dismantle
A car ECU is worth $200 to $1,500 as a working module and $3 to $8 a pound as a bare board. Opening the case or breaking the tamper seal converts the first number into the second permanently.
The same applies to server boards, GPUs, industrial controllers and test equipment. Check whether it works before you strip it, and use the buyer routing tool to find where a working unit goes.
The circuit board guide covers grades, refiner economics and route selection in full.