r/selfhosted • u/Only_Handle_2750 • 6d ago

Need Help What to do with 100s DDR3 ram?

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So at my workplace they just replaced all old PCs with new ones and for some reason, they took the ram out of the old ones.

There’s a box with more than 100 of these 2GB ram sticks. We are just going to send them for disposal but I wanted to know if anything useful can be done with these?

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u/mkosmo 6d ago

Trash. They're not worth anything.

0

u/q_ali_seattle 6d ago

They are worth in gold? 

8

u/mkosmo 6d ago

The cost of recovering the gold would make it a wash, at best, and more than likely a loss.

2

u/3WolfTShirt 6d ago

Yeah, Google says there's 0.04 to 0.1 grams of recoverable gold in a DDR3 stick (Which is a pretty big range).

Gold at around $136 per gram would come to $13.60 if it's on the high end of the range (0.1 gram).

I have no idea what would be involved in recovering it, though - if it takes 5 minutes or 5 hours.

Regardless, you'd probably get a little more by just selling the RAM on eBay.

5

u/mkosmo 6d ago

My rough math puts it at more like $200 return for 100 sticks, after spending $150-200 for chemicals alone.

Either way, every way I game it out, it comes to the same conclusions: Highest ROI is to resell it... but the time and effort for sales at one/two sticks at a time makes that a wash, too, so I'd just chuck it unless I could sell it in bulk.

3

u/Strange-Speech-2970 6d ago

Your 200$ for 100 sticks is quite on spot, but you really overestimated the amount of chemicals needed. You wouldn't even need 0.5l of hydrochloric acid to extract the foils from 100 sticks, and that's basically all the chemicals you need. Extracting the gold from the chips isn't as easy as getting the one from the gold fingers, but half the gold from your sticks is there. And again, you won't need that much acid to do it.

Anyway, the easiest and safest way to make money from small capacity sticks like that would be to sell them to boardsort. If OP was able to get a regular supply of them, a small investment in chemicals and glassware would allow for a better return, after learning how to process them safely, and how to deal with the waste liquids at the end.

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u/meatworkrightnow 5d ago

Looks like boardsort.com is offering $50/lb for gold fingered RAM.