You won't make much headway as long as you are staring at a pile of mixed grade boards. Pick out one board, look it over, then holding it as reference, go thru your stacks, separating out those that look similar to the one you are holding. Once you have those out of the pile, and separated, do the same with another board, until you have your collection sorted into boards that look a little bit alike. Don't worry about identifying them at this stage. You can learn the fine points of calling them George or Bill or Sue after you get which family they are in. Low Grade is usually anything with a brown board. The board is simply a holder for the components, and usually is drilled thru and has solder connections on the back. These have low grade components, not many of them, and heavy transformers, large capacitors, and large aluminum heat sinks which add a lot of weight to the board, but no value as precious metals. Usually not worth shipping because of cost/weight/return ratios. Alternatives are deliver in person to Boardsort along with quality boards, or strip the transformers for the copper and aluminum for sale at your local yard. Mid Grade is similar to Low grade, in that it has a lot of heavy iron/copper coils/transformers, heat sinks, and capacitors. The obvious difference is the mounting circuit board is Green. This means the board is composed of several layers of fiberglass cloth, with a layer of copper tracings which connect the various components, so there is copper value inside the bare board. A green board can have some ICs and other electronic components and still be mid grade if it has the heavy components. Usually not enough components to upgrade it to low peripheral even if the heavy components removed. As to shipping, again not practical, but good for in person delivery. Note: if you are scrapping industrial/commercial equipment, often you will find a hybrid board that has both a power supply type end and a more heavily populated end, in which case it is profitable to remove the heavy components and ship. Low peripheral is sort of limbo land. Not a lot on the green board to make it valuable, but not anything to give it excessive weight, ie, no transformers, large coils, not many IC chips. High Peripheral is almost a Motherboard without the CPU chip. It will have pretty good electronic component populations: IC chips (usually soldered) flat packs sometimes, diodes, transistors, usually a lot of components. Also it should have some connectors, hopefully gold pin. May or may not have edge connectors like a Motherboard. Actually at todays prices, some High Peripheral are worth more than recent Motherboards. I would suggest you sort out the above categories from the main pile and spend a few minutes recognizing them...low and mid grades easy. It is too daunting to try to make sense of the whole range in one pile. Once you have these boards separated, the task will seem less overwhelming. I will not go into the better grades in this discussion.
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