[Joe]

Over the past few weeks I have been pondering the future of this hobby. A question that keeps coming up in my head is "is water cooling dying or going that route?" Here’s my rationale for that question:

1. Current HSF's and Fans while being loud can cool very close to what a raw water cooled system runs.

2. Prices of very good HSF's are down as low as 20$ where as good and quality watercooling system will cost an investment of near 200$

3. New CPU's that are selling at clock speeds of near 3Ghz are here, is OC'n needed on the CPU? Now I know OC'n isn't just about speed, but getting more out of what you have. I can appreciate it, but the question comes up... Is it worth the headaches that are associated with high OC's?

Back 3.5 years ago when OC'n a P200MMX to 255Mhz was considered the most bad OC around, people would sacrifice the stability for a lil additional kick in speed and a few more FPS ( since back then most games were still all software rendered).

With that said, today with CPU's nearing 3Ghz, there is PLENTY of CPU power for almost any application, but the Video card, memory tech, and AGP/PCI interfaces are the bottle necks of the system. One thing that DOES have an impact and some serious potential still is the cooling and OC'n of the video gear since they are now putting out such extreme amounts of heat compared to what they were just a year ago.

4. For extreme cooling, Phase Change systems are becoming cheaper, and more easily accessible to most users. They can even be made from household appliances with some mods. Now when I say Extreme cooling I am talking about sub ambient cooling, not raw water cooling.

Heres my thoughts on how this industry will be changing in the next year or so:

HSF technology will grow slowly since it is already at the peak of Heat dissipation technology (well.. the technology that’s mass producible and affordable). With some advances of Heat Pipes I think you will see HSF's and HSF/Heat Pipes take the place of the base line watercooling setups.

For noise reasons normal watercooling will remain around, but it will be used for noise more than anything else, I think you will see some of the market start to shrink also as the practicality of watercooling starts to evaporate for most geeks.

Phase Change will replace Watercooled systems as the answer for high end cooling but still very quiet. I think within a year or 2 you will see Phase Change systems drop into the 300$ price range or less. Since most of these are bolt on and go type setups they offer less headaches than watercooling and provide a much more maintenance free setup.

Now I am not saying that watercoolings going to up and disappear, just saying I think the "boom" that everyone has seen is going to start to taper off as the hardware just doesn’t need it, since extreme OC's will start to matter less and less.

Now this is just all my opinion, and I may be wrong, But I think it makes a lot of sense that we will see the HSF and Phase change technologies start to squeeze in on watercooling at the top and the bottom end.

What you think??