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PostPosted: Fri Jan 22, 2021 4:14 pm 

Joined: Tue Jan 12, 2021 8:53 pm
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Hey Everyone,

I'm still relatively new to scrapping and i've gotten a lot of useful information on here.

I'm still a bit confused about something though. Was looking through the payout list and i was wondering why cell phone boards pay better than most types of boards.

Apologies if this seems like a silly question


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 22, 2021 8:34 pm 
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Cell phone boards, as a class including a few other items, cover one very specific group of very high end boards.

They are small in size; rarely beyond 6 inches on a side and never above 7 inches diagonally.

They are high value as a base board. Using 1-3 layers of AU-ZR alloy as the conductive layers rather than copper.

They compress an entire motherboard onto a credit card. No explanation needed here. All of that is now on this? Wow.

Almost all use 3DC extensively. At it’s most simplified 3D circuitry is stacked layers of chips in a single housing. 3D chips add vias, gates, and lanes not found in flat chips. Increasing the value of a chip beyond its single story counterparts.

They use extremely high quality, high value components. Noble metals like iridium, gold, rhodium, silver...
platinum group such as platinum, paladin, nickel,
Rare earths like lanthanum, neodymium, praseodymium, etc.

Ultimately they make up large collections of value in small sizes with little “junk” material when shields and motors are removed.

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PostPosted: Fri Jan 22, 2021 10:09 pm 

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Thank you very much for your response. I really appreciate it.

Are hard drive boards also in the category of high grade boards or are they mid grade?


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 23, 2021 2:44 am 
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Boardsort separates beyond the standard low mid and high.
Hard drive controllers are at the bottom end of high grade for most companies that don’t sort.

Most hard drive boards go as hard drive board class. Any hard drive boards later than 1986 will go as hard drive boards. Prior to that, 5.25” drives and larger, it’s hit and miss on which of the two or three boards will go as hard drive board.

Like some other item specific classes hard drive controller boards are a known commodity with consistent components. There’s only 18 ways to put together an ATA drive controller and 5 for 3.5” SATA drives. 6-8 for 2.n inch drives depending on if mechanical or SSD. You can swap around vendors but the boards require the same set of chips per design. Regardless of who makes the chips and code, and who brands the drive.

That wasn’t the case prior to 85/86. When everyone and anyone made drives. A 5.25” drive is far from a true precision component. And I’ve seen quit a few over the years operating, even recently, with the tops off to keep them cool. You could buy kits from the back of Byte or Compute or Radio Today. The move to 3.5” drives and mandatory timing and precision for smaller tracks and larger sizes made consolidation a must.

Pre 85/86 the board with the head control and I/O control usually falls into hard drive board. The second board is midgrade or peripheral
IBM and DEC both made 3 board units.
For IBM all three boards are peripheral. For DEC (10” cartridge drives) the disk controller is high telco, the timing/clock board is peripheral with a battery on it and the i/o board is midgrade with a trimable gold finger connector.

Everyone else’s back then is open to discussion.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 23, 2021 9:49 pm 

Joined: Tue Jan 12, 2021 8:53 pm
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Thank you. That was extremely helpful.

The last question i have is, whats the difference between mid grade and peripheral. I was told they could be used interchangeably but looking at the identification forum, that doesn't seem to be the case.


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PostPosted: Sun Jan 24, 2021 2:50 pm 
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aubalansky wrote:
“... I was told they could be used interchangeably but looking at the identification forum, that doesn't seem to be the case.”

The major reasoning here is boardsort isn’t a scrap yard. They’re a scrap supply buyer. I know; semantics.

In the basic scrap industry everything is based on a 4 number tier of classing.
1 is best, 4 is junk.
For escrap here’s a few of the general terms; and how they relate to boardsort.

4-low grade. This is anything below BoardSort’s Peripheral class.
Terms at low grade, electrical shred, mixed escrap.

3-mid grade. This is peripheral, motherboards, low telecom, cd/dvd drives, etc.
Terms at mid grade include mid grade, midgrade, peripheral, escrap.

2-high grade. This is ram, high telecom, hard drive boards, etc.
Terms include high grade, high telecom, and occasionally #1 escrap.

1-high grade clean or #4 PM. If used this is hard drive boards, working systems, CPUs, cell phone boards, silver intra-network cables, gold pins and edge connectors. Basically anything boardsort buys at cell phone board rate or above.

Small volume or non-focused scrap yard buy from the consumer and dump escrap into one or two classes and then sell it by the truck load to large supply yards.

These supply yard scrap companies tend to break down the mix into 4 classes and sell them up to electrical recyclers and escrap sorters.

These companies further spurt down to very specific classes and sell to escrap source companies, such as boardsort.

Source supply companies like boardsort are the top of the recycling chain. From here the materials go to very specific recovery companies who recycle and refine, or sell to refiners and remanufacturing.

This is why boardsort puts such a focus on the sort aspect. They pay as high as they do for what a local yard would give you penny’s for; because they know exactly what a 1200lb Gaylord of gold ram sticks averages out to. So when they load 20 gayloards into a trailer they know exactly what to expect range wise.


As long as we’re covering terminology let me hit to more. Breakage (on the price list) and shred: used by many experienced users here.
First shred. Which is an honest name. Shred is anything of /some/ value that’s too expensive in man hours to recover manually. Items are literally dumped into gigantic commercial shredders that can turn a refrigerator or pickup truck into 1-5 inch pieces. Or a jelly doughnut. These shredders range from the size of a table to the size of buildings used for ship breaking.

Breakage is anything that has a better recovery aspect by manually “breaking” it down. If not bought separately this includes Motor spindles, TV yokes, transformers, aluminium screen doors, appliances, cars, etc.
Despite the fact that most of these will actually be shredded first they will be manually broken down to some degree both before and after shredding by the same company doing the shredding.
Most yards consider computers and laptops to be breakage. The term shred usually is used for something dirty. Copper shred is copper pipes with brass fitting and nickel solder. Or aluminium-copper heatainks.
Aluminium shred covers aluminium heatsinks with steel clamps, batteries, canister capacitors, and, technically, aluminium cans with their tin layer.

The lowest shred classes are mixed plastic, and steel. Steel including all sorts of not steel stuff from paper and wood and plastic, to organics, to refuge recovery.

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PostPosted: Fri Feb 12, 2021 7:50 pm 

Joined: Tue Jan 12, 2021 8:53 pm
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@lostinlodos, i was looking through this again, you didn't include laptop boards in any of the 4 tiers. where will you rank them? mid or high?


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PostPosted: Sat Feb 13, 2021 5:42 pm 
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from a refiners aspect it's much more complicated than just the presort high level recyclers or normal scrap recyclers look at.
Most actual laptops, over 16" diagonal would be either midgrade or low high. Assuming they're not sorted out entirely.

Standard laptop boards don't offer anything special over standard motherboards other than the lower board material weight meaning they're worth more per pound.
But some boards, like their desktop counterparts, can be more valuable. An ASRock Extreme or X class board, the Gigabyte Pro, Asus FX boards, etc.
Embedded high end graphics chips, onboard SoundBlaster chips, and built in SSDs make them a class of their own for some buyers. Obviously placing an entire 1Tb SSD on the board changes things.

Add some extreme end stuff like Falcon and CyberPower and you get laptops that are undeniably high grade level with copper canister capacitors, 3/4 pound copper layers in the board, gold flashed everything. But stuff like Falcon is kind of a class of its own in that these are extreme machines, like hotrod cars, meant to be shown off as much as used. Pop-up access to the motherboard via removable keyboard. fancy gold flashed heat sinks and fan guards. nothing logical in the bling but it's bling none the less.


Chris has actually been pretty firm on motherboards. like most top level sorters.
it's at the point where averages across a class spectrum help the 99% better than the 1% extreme.
But those extremes will often get quoted into high telco for the pure compact volume of components. that and the external ports are almost always breakaway cables, not soldered ports. (they connect by cable to a mounted port in the case). reducing any steel weight associated with motherboards. When half the weight is copper and another quarter is mostly ceramic IC packages classing gets modified a bit.

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