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Originally Posted by Eddy_EK
Interesting stuff.
How much % of the market in USA or WORLD do you think swiftech owns?
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If I were going to take a blind stab at it, probably fifteen percent or so I would guess is Swiftech stuff out there. I think just about everyone on this forum has a Swiftech widget of some kind. Me personally, I have an old MCW5002, several of their big air cooler 'sinks (in my buddie's server), a pump, a radiator, and the fill kit, though I don't currently use any of it right now! I would imagine the "biggest" company in watercooling right now is probably Koolance. They are the only ones I know of with an actual, existing OEM customer, Alienware.
The market for watercooling is changing fast though as it gets very mainstream at all. There are big players in East Asia with lots of manufacturing capacity that are now starting to roll out WC stuff. Coolermaster is one, and the ubiquitous rip-off company Thermaltake is hawking their junk. They will get as much of the market as they do with heatsinks. Enthusiast premium stuff will never be "big" in it's respective marketplace. Its like cars or stereos....both are big business obviously, but how many people buy Ferraris and Krells?
One thing any enthusiast startup in WCing is going to need is some differentiation from everyone else if they are going to survive the Asian hordes. All WC'ing companies essentially sell a oil-cooler radiator, fish tank pump, and a chunck of copper cut in a particular way, and call it a water cooling kit. The Taiwanese can do the same thing, much cheaper, with their big Chinese mainland production capacity. Dell will call them before it calls Swiftech, because they essentially sell the same thing. Four degrees of C is not worth ten times the price to Dell, which is why you don't see even nice aircoolers like Thermalright XP's or Swiftys in ANY big box supplier