I need a circuit board for dummies. Just started to scrap and have found many tvs, game controllers, phones, etc but do not understand what I am looking at. Do I sell the whole thing or remove components to sell separate? Also a pic of a ceramic chip - what do I do with that? And the gold brass looking thing - not a clue!!
Thank you so much for your help


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scrapping them whole as is (to someone other than boardsort like a local yard) is by far the lowest amount of return on an item.
how much time you wish to take on dissembling is up to you.

for a long time these just barely made the bottom end of peripheral I believe they still do.

top to bottom
cd/dvd card
peripheral
peripheral
left peripheral right midgrade
left midgrade right peripheral
depends on the back; peripheral as i can see

top to bottom
peripheral
midgrade
midgrade
peripheral
peripheral
left peripheral (if silver fingers, gold finger card if gold) right peripheral
left memory card, needs to be removed from the plastic case for peripheral, right sim card, sim card rate (it's not on the quote form, if you have over a pound they'll pay on sim card rate, if under just toss it in midgrade)

peripheral
left peripheral centre peripheral right depends on the back side, midgrade from what's shown.

if back is also flashed and empty then telco. if only one side peripheral. if stuff on the other side post a picture.

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Thank you for your reply. I am not going to sell it to a yard, I know I won't get the best return. What I would like to know is ... for Boardsort these boards selling them whole or taking off the chips and selling separate which gives the best return?

You’ll always get the best return breaking an item down to the board level.

How far you go is up to you.
An industrial recycler like the people who buy stuf from Boardsort will use massive reflow units to depopulate a board to it’s bare empty beginning.
Most aluminium capacitors have a PP wrapper, an aluminium shell, a rare earth mineral oil, and two small pieces of metal, one of them a precious metal. And normally a tiny piece of paper. Plus the silver plated nickel contacts.
On a (dis)assembly line doing hundreds or thousands of capacitors per second... there’s real money in that.
You won’t see me advocating doing a full strip on cell phone boards though. Not even on peripheral class boards.
With something like a computer most people, starting out, are best served disassembling it to the store level parts. Motherboard, peripheral cards (gold finger class) ram and a bunch of peripherals like hard drive, DVD player etc.
From there you can pull the controller boards from each device. Such as th board from a DVD player (CD/DVD board), hard drive (hard drive controller).

That’s where most people stop. It’s the point where value vs time spent is at it’s best. There’s a few writups I did and some comments from others on time vs return in the escrap general threads. I can strip a hard drive to mechanical assembly in about 30 seconds and that’s worth it for me. A dvd drive takes about 90 seconds on most modern ones and is not worth the time.
A vcr can be broken down in under a minute and gives me a peripheral board, a midgrade board, and a low grade board. But I also get a large transformer and 2-8 aluminium read/write heads. So you pull $4 or so in 90 seconds of work for a 99c vcr.
Excluding the 5 seconds to remove the board, a dvd rom in the same time frame gives you less than $1, and usually about 50č
My yard gives me approximately 25č for it whole minus the board.
Cable boxes and network routers usually give you a peripheral board, and with the former possibly a low grade power board. Some wire and if a dvr a hard drive as well. These are worth the 30 seconds and 15 seconds spent respectively. Where breaking down a cell phone takes a few minutes, is dangerous with internal batteries packs that are glued, gives you stuff the MUST be disposed of properly at your expense, and rarely gives you more than $5 in parts scrap. So the $3 for the whole phone looks real good.

In any level of recycling the further you break down the item, the more costly the process for diminishing returns.
If the article I read is accurate, melting 50 lbs of plastic soda bottles and moulding a park bench costs $10 in energy and gives you a $50 bench. $40
Chemically breaking down the same 50 lbs of bottles to raw chemicals and creating new virgin plastic and forming new bottles costs $25-$30 in energy and gives you $100 in bottles: $65-$70 in profits. [energy is input, not just electrical but also wages, repairs and mainten Etc]

So as long and extensive as that reply is the answer is simply: it’s up to you.

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More directly: Boardsort doesn’t pay for bare blank boards, though they will recycle them for you. Removing IC chips quickly drops any board in class quickly, to midgrade most often, or even low grade.

Removing gold pins and gold contacts and ic chips from 10 motherboards is probably going to break even for you in gold pin and contact quote, and ic weight, and low grade boards.
Doing so to 100 boards, the value difference is noticeable. Components will be worth more than the raw boards. Just keep in mind removing JUST the ICs from a motherboard will drop it to midgrade. Removing ONE bridge chip or I/O controller will drop a motherboard of any socket size to peripheral.

The sole place I regularly find it worth destroying something at the board level is OLD finger cards. Big long ones over 8 inches in length. The two payout for clean gold fingers and trimmed finger cards work out better than the gold finger card rate.
That does NOT apply to modern era gold finger cards as a general rule

Also if your local yard can pay you ANYTHING for low and midgrade boards, removing pins and ICs from those low end boards for selling to Boardsort while dumping the junk boards locally will also increase your value returns

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