By 
Earlier this month, we learned all about the painstaking but far-from-impossible process of refining gold in your own kitchen and backyard from Cody of Cody's Lab. That was fascinating in its own right, but now the DIY chemist has but his metallurgical know-how to what seems like a slightly more practical purpose: ripping the gold off old, useless computer parts.
Gold is a incredible conductor of electricity, which is why it's used as a coating in a lot of electronics, especially parts where data transfer happens like RAM. So what if you could get a handful of this old computer crap yourself and set to ripping the gold right off? The process isn't that difficult, as Cody shows (though some cyanide does show up), but the results are maybe not worth the effort.
When all is said and done, Cody was about to get about a third of a gram of gold-ish metal out of the parts you see above, and even that third of a gram did not look especially pure. Best best best case scenario that might net you $10? And no matter how little you value your labor, that's almost certainly less than the cost of refining materials. This would only be profitable at huge, much-bigger-than-kitchen scale.
So while it might be a fun if time-intensive trick to strip the gold out of your old computer chips, your probably better off just recycling.
Source: Cody's Lab
