[pHaestus]

Well for me I like my hobbies to be, you know, FUN. Time sinks and hard work are fine, but there have to be some rewards at the end. The notion of a water cooling website for DIYers was pretty much was doomed when the Swiftech 6000 series wbs were released. Top rate performance for $30? No need to bother with building blocks any more. And at that point the whole hobbiest aspect of it becomes a lot less interesting.

It's kinda like having a website devoted to reviewing hammers or any other tool; you open up the box and assemble it and it goes. There are some good articles that could still be produced related to watercooling I think: Fill/bleed/res comparisons and actual experiences, proper mixing and matching of components if you still roll your own kit, and long-term maintenance and upkeep are I guess real issues surrounding water cooling tech.

It's hard for me to go back to doing a case review or something like that when I have picked up a lot of technical expertise. But then again the technical expertise and equipment I have is just enough to be dissatisfied with any results I produce, so whatever.

I guess to me the excitement about water cooling IS dead, but the original reasons we were pushing computers to their limits remain exciting. HTPC stuff, DV editing, quiet performance, home networks, file storage and networking, and of course gaming are all things we still actively do as hobbies on our water cooled or air cooled uber boxes. I doubt many of us are buying Dells yet, for example.

Is there a way to take the enthusiasm that we had for our cooling hobby and pour it into a more general technology fan-site? That might be a way to rekindle the community here while still keeping the hot bits all cool...