Boardsort.com

First time posting here, so I apologize if this question is answered somewhere that I have not found yet.

I have a batch of PC motherboards, peripheral cards, power supply cards, hard drive boards and other various PCBs that range from the 8086 to Pentium 4 era. Some of these boards and cards are in pieces and came from PCs, DVRs, tape players, AM/FM receivers, VCRs and other machines that look like they have been attacked by a sledgehammer or given the "Office Space" printer treatment. All have been depopulated of gold pins, aluminum heatsinks, steel parts, any exposed copper, chips, tantalum caps and MLCCs. The peripheral cards from ISA to PCI-e have had the fingers cut off. I also have a healthy amount of various RAM from 30 pin SIMMS to the most recent that wouldn't sell for more than a couple dollars on ebay, and a healthy amount of CPUs from 386 to Pentium 4. None of the RAM has been depopulated.

There are a many small green boards like those on PC fans.

Pentium II processors--send those with CPU detached from its card or as a unit?

Should I sort this stuff per the Pay Out Rates list? I imagine all of these boards and cards exclusive of the RAM and CPUs would be low grade? There are also a large number of caps and other pieces that have come off somewhere along the line. Should I just throw all of the pieces in a box and weigh it? Some of it consists of just circuit board traces with some solder and a few discrete components like resistors and caps attached.

Thank you for any help. I can post a photo tomorrow of what I'm looking at if it will help.

Well: assaulted boards are always going to be by board grading.
Ram and CPUs if properly sorted pay well. Depopulated boards, are all over the place.
For extreme examples:
I’ve had totally striped wire backplanes from the 70s still wind up in the telco (pre split) class do to the pure volume of gold in the pin holes.
And I’ve had LED sign mounts (just gold pins) make midgrade (I expected low) due to the few dozen pins on the huge empty board.
In general depopulation reduces a boards value. Quickly. A stripped motherboard with JUST the external ports will be low grade. Stripping an Galaxy Edge board bare can still get peripheral.

Anything damaged needs to be reviewed one by one.
Pictures make classing easy.

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-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

Is there a grading guide for cards here like the one for motherboards so that I can sort my material for shipping without posting photos to ask you good folks what everything is? The photos are so tiny on the sell list, and the photo for gold finger card with no bracket HAS a bracket.

I have a bunch of old ISA and PCI, and a few SCSI cards: sound cards, video cards, network adapters, memory boards, old MFD HDD controller cards, power supply boards, and mouse boards (many ball and a few optical with a chip that looks like it has gold legs), and some cards I don't recognize. Then I have some odds and ends of which I have only one of each, like a small home Wi-Fi/Router board, a DVR motherboard that has been depopulated...

Some cards have had the fingers cut off. All transformers have been removed. All copper bearing inductors have been removed. All steel and aluminum heatsinks have been removed. All backplate brackets have been removed. Some MLCC and Tantalum caps have been removed. All pin jumpers have been removed.

I have never seen anything about the jumpers--Does anyone know are the jumper guts gold plated? They look like it.

The finger cards are fairly easy.
The brackets
you remove the fans and heatsinks and brackets or don’t.

There’s a class for fingerless cards all to its own.

The only fluke in gold finger cards is a very small set of cards that would make high telco. These are so short a list I can simply list them

from creative like the Gold and Platinum line XFi cards.
From AMD/ATI the fire pro X cards in the V series. 512MB or above
From Voodoo 3DFX the original accelerator cards (4 or 6 processor).

Modern-ish PCIe SSD cards. Small form factor cards with total population.

Almost anything else falls into the finger card classes.

_________________
-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

Most mice are peripheral

Consumer and pro-Sumer Router boards are usually peripheral. Extremely high end ones and commercial routers have about half fall into low telco.

However any depopulated board needs to be looked at individually.

Plastic Jumpers are mixed. Many are gold. Though brass exists. Brass jumpers are normally of a redder verity brass though. You’ll also see silver and nickel.

Chris did have a specific non listed class for jumpers at one point so email them.

_________________
-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

Thank you. New questions:

I see you buy HDD platters. I have had a a pile of these for years and been trying to figure out what to do with them. Now I'm scrapping out some more drives so I will have quite a few. Do you buy the aluminum only, or all?

Gold coated pins... Do you buy all data connector pins the same? Just about every photo I see on this site shows ONLY the squarish pins from board cable connectors and jumper pins that appear to be just soaked in gold. Not all of the data connector pins look like that.

I have many from ribbon cable connectors, many male and female pins from 9-pin, 25-pin, 34-pin, 40-pin 50-pin and 80-pin serial, parallel and connectors as well as FDD, MFD, IDE, EIDE, SCSI. Some of these pins have solder in them, and you do show some of these cable connectors in the E-Scrap Gallery.

I also have a few pins from motherboard CPU, RAM, IDE, FDD, ISA, PCI, PCI-e and AGP slots. Some of these appear to have very little gold on them, probably only on the contact surface.

There’s only three types of hard disk platters in general use. I’ve sent all three types mixed without issue.
Unless Chris says otherwise some point down the line, platters are platters.

Generally speaking pins are pins. The listed rates are an ideal point for both sides. Boardsort doesn’t have to individually scan each pin; you don’t have to sort excessively. It’s an average rate that fits the majority of people.
That said there’s always exceptions.
If you have a large enough amount of something that’s off of the normal classes to be weighed on their own: quote it in the correct class. Follow the instructions in the quote process. Send an email with your quote number and tracking number, and a photo of the non-standard items.
This will alert them so they can review them when they get your order.

Do keep in mind the pin class is for clean pins.
Pins with solder, or plastic, should be separated from the clean ones. This also applies to pins with minimal plating.
If I haven’t done so already I’ll post my pin pulling video today. So you can watch how I break down and sub sort.
Non-clean go in one pile. I usually trim and clean them later.
I cut the non plated sections off
And finally sort out non-steel and non-tin base pins from the lot for a special review.

_________________
-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

How do I find your videos? I see only the "Popular" ones on the home page.

YouTube is a bit slow today. Only the excessively oversized hd version and the 720p is available at the moment.
If you subscribe and click the bell you’ll get notifications as I post. A slow process at the moment but I have a backlog of about 15 to post. And I make new ones each week. So I’m a bit behind.
The current post for the pins video is here.

Unfortunately: I’m using a very high end camera (thanks SK) but don’t have a microphone. Not that it matters as all I ever say is ouch or random groans as I stab my self or slash my fingers open. ;)
And occasionally nasty words as things go flying accidentally.

And constantly tell my “helper” to not eat that. Little fur ball has a thing for anything Shiny! But she’s saved my life more than once and even dragged my attention to what would have been the lose of our house to an electrical explosion. Before it happened. So I’m never too hard on her.

_________________
-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

I am curious how your helper dragged your attention to an electrical issue that could have blown up your house? That sounds like a cool story!