Modding not popular anymore?

While I agree with the growing out of the modding hobby because of career and family...
I disagree with the expensive tools and not necessary arguments. The tools are far cheaper than nearly any component you're putting into your system. And personally there isn't a "perfect" case out there for me. I've modified nearly every case I've ever owned for added functionality.
But like I said, I totally agree that many cases available today meet most needs without modification. And I whole-heartedly agree about growing out of it and having other more important things to spend my time on. But I've never considered modding an expensive hobby. Making them scratch? Absolutely more pricey.
 
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I think a lot of people might be on a tighter budget and seeing as there are so many pretty decent cases that look awesome and have great features, people just go with a stock case.

I think also when people are on a budget unless they are very handy with tools and such, they might not want to risk damaging something since they likely might not have the cash to fix the mistakes.

I did some modding on cheap computers to get the hang of some things before trying anything major. Then by the time I was ready to build my super system from scratch, I found a case I liked and no real modding was needed, only cable management.
 
CMadki4 said:
While I agree with the growing out of the modding hobby because of career and family...
I disagree with the expensive tools and not necessary arguments. The tools are far cheaper than nearly any component you're putting into your system. And personally there isn't a "perfect" case out there for me. I've modified nearly every case I've ever owned for added functionality.
But like I said, I totally agree that many cases available today meet most needs without modification. And I whole-heartedly agree about growing out of it and having other more important things to spend my time on. But I've never considered modding an expensive hobby. Making them scratch? Absolutely more pricey.
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Agreed. Most of the tools outside of a few specialty items (like a metal bender) can be used in other areas. Heat guns are great for removing old paint and caulking. Sanders and some painting materials good for revitalizing non-veneer, real wood furniture. Dremels can be used to help install new doors.

Even some vinyl applying skills could help with veneer based old furniture and Buick Roadmaster side panels :)

That being said, with so many new cases being window'd and supporting a fairly large array of water cooling options, I think the subtle mods are not needed like they once were, and that's why you're seeing the big names like MNPCTech rule the modding roost, because it's taking more to impress.
 
I wish more people would show off their mods. I know some people have high standards and only want to look at the $10k builds, but personally I like to see a little bit of everything. Even if it's just a "lego" built rig with some custom sleeved wires or some lights. I even like digging through the ghetto mods thread to see what people come up with. What can I say, I guess I'm addicted to computer pr0n :D
 
Stock cases used to really suck. Not so much anymore.

I still like looking at real mods where people make really clean builds.

i just don't have time for it anymore.

I do have an old Lian Li case that will fit a dual socket motherboard... maybe I will get to use it someday.. and it will be modded if I do.
 
I've done plenty of modding to my cases 5-10 years ago. Now I also feel i dont have the time i used too. being 24, working 70 hours and having a 2 year old, 5 month old, and a wife I just find the case that meets my requirements. Cases have come a LONG way.
 
Fenris_Ulf said:
Case modding used to (a dozen years ago) be done by people with skill and very few good tools. Nothing was pre-made, cases came in beige, everything had to be adapted from parts from auto and home improvement stores, and maybe only 5% of cases were ever modded. Now cases come in a rainbow of colors with windows, lights, etc, power supplies are modular and sleeved and come in more than industrial grey, optical drives come in more than beige, and even water cooling is mainstream and pre-built. Honestly, it's just Legos that anyone can do. To really go above and beyond takes lots of expensive tools that are beyond the average home builder - laser cutters, waterjets, CNC mills, spray booths, etc.
It's like custom cars - what used to be a few mods to personalize a vehicle has evolved into needing a Chip Foose level of craftsmanship to even get a second look. And for many of us first generation modders, life has caught up and the responsibilities of jobs and family take up alot of our time and finances.
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This x100000. I cut my first window and 80MM top blowhole in a steel Antec SX830 with a dremel tool. Rounded my SCSI and IDE cables with some white tubing I got from OSH. Used black gaffers tape to sleeve up the rainbow PSU cables. Forget running cables through the back, cause there was no room to do that. By the time I wanted a rheobus, they were selling them for $30, so I just bought one.

Miss those days. Now just give me a smallish PC with a big vidcard and get off mah lawn!
 
Modding is still alive and kicking at LAN parties. PDXLAN has an insane number of awesome case mods.

@DraginDime: Agree with you 100%

Also, one of the benefits I have seen from being heavily sponsored and such is that I get to pass on modding needs to up and coming modders. I think I have brought 20 totes of modding and hardware to PDXLANS over the last two years alone.
 
I think it's become less necessary. I got into it around mid/late 2002, and at the time, black cases were just starting to come out on the market in force, as well as the first "pre-modded" cases with lighting and windows. Back then, if you wanted something to look cool, or have good performance, you had to mod it yourself. I remember dremeling out the uber-restrictive steel fan grilles (the ones that were just a bunch of ~1/8" holes drilled in the metal) to get a ton better cooling performance. I also did stuff like cutting two 80mm fan holes together to be a 120mm fan hole. You really needed to work a lot to get good cooling. I painted a case silver and then got some thin masking tape to mask out racing stripes and painted them bright blue and got a ton of positive feedback on bit-tech. I didn't have to do anything to the inside of the case, and I spent maybe $5.

Now, I think the case makers have come a long way. I was thrilled to have a Chieftec Dragon that had those purple snap-in fan mounts and drive bays that could be removed with levers, as well as the tool-less optical drive bays. Now, tool-less is kinda the norm. Cooling is a lot better, too. You used to have one 80mm fan above the mobo backplane, and one or two 80mm intakes. Now every case comes with 120 or 140mm side panel fans, top fans, multiple intakes, even a bottom intake. And the majority have nice punched-out grilles that don't hurt airflow.

The other big piece is watercooling. Cases weren't really designed for it. People used a lot of heater cores or other non-standard size radiators, so you'd always have to cut it to fit. Now a lot of cases will have 2 or 3 120/140mm fans all in a row, so you can easily fit a radiator without mods. Heatpipes really hurt custom loop watercooling, too. Until then, your heatsink was just a plain old heatsink, and if it got too big, heat wouldn't transfer enough through the farthest parts to be worthwhile. So pretty much the biggest you could go would be a single 92mm horizontal heatsink fan (Look up the Thermalright SLK-900 if anyone is curious, that was pretty much the pinnacle of air cooling before the heatpipe). GPUs were the same - dual slot coolers didn't exist, so even flagship GPUs had a regular ol copper heatsink with a 40mm fan at the center of it. Again, for the curious, look up discussions on a PC modding forum from when the first Gefore FX pictures came out, and read how a dual-slot squirrel cage blower graphics card that had an external exhaust just blew our minds. Because you had that hard limit of one CPU fan and one GPU fan, you needed to get loud, fans and because neither was setup to exhaust air outside of the case, you also needed plenty of case airflow, so custom loop watercooling was really popular for anyone looking for performance or noise. Then, the heatpipe went mainstream, as well as external exhaust blower GPUs, and suddenly aircooling got a lot more effective and a lot quieter. If you want a laugh, look at the infamous "Prescott" P4 that was known for being ridiculously hot. It's got something like an 80w TDP. Lower than a modern quad core. But because we didn't have heatpipes, you needed a loud cooler, you couldn't make a big heatsink effective. Now heatpipes let you make a gigantic cooler with one or more slow, quiet fans and get good performance.

So, for the regular joe who is just looking to improve performance, there's really no need to mod anymore. You can get a decent looking case with good cooling performance and tool-less access for a very reasonable price. So, now, to get into modding, you've got to either want some obscure configuration that isn't available, or you are really going after a unique style. For most people, that doesn't apply.

I also think in a lot of ways, the modding community has become more grown-up, and more subtle. We used to like some pretty garish mods, now it's all about perfectly matching colors, individually sleeved cables, CNC or laser cut details, subtle stuff like that, not rainbow colors, blue neon lights, and UV reactive everything. I was a teenager in 2002 when I first got into it, and I had a windowed case with a blue neon light that I thought was really cool. Now I have a very sleek looking, understated case.

One thing I think that hasn't been touched on is that a lot of us have lost our personal connection with our hardware. We've been through so many components over the years, we're just not willing to invest a ton of time and money into improving one of them. It kinda hit me the first time a few years ago, when I finally threw away the Gigabyte socket 478 mobo that I had painstakingly researched and selected in 2003, which I hadn't used since 2008ish. I had read a ton of reviews and very carefully picked it out, and it served me well, and it was no longer worth anything to me. The first time you shop for high end components, it's like being a kid in a candy store, and you don't stop to think that in 5 years, they're going to be just as outdated and useless as the cheap components. You've got to keep things in perspective, and realize that nobody is judging you for not having the greatest hardware. The first time I shopped for a PC without a hard budget constraint, I wanted to get the highest end everything - i7 instead of i5, flagship video card, the $300 mobo with every feature available instead of the $150 mainstream enthusiast mobo, etc to build the absolute best rig I could. But at the end of the day, when the next generation comes out, it's all outdated. I firmly believe that "future-proofing" a gaming PC is a fool's endeavor. Build it to what you need now, because when you need more than you've got, new stuff will be out. I don't agree with, the mentality that you want to build a gaming rig that will crush anything you can throw at it for the next 5 years. To do that, you've got to get well into the realm of diminishing returns. You can spend $3000 building an insane rig that will handle 5 years of gaming evolution, or you can spend $1200 building a mainstream rig that will handle 3 years of gaming evolution, and then in three years, build another $1200 mainstream rig for the next 3 years. This seems to be especially true for GPUs. I'd argue that over the past half a decade or so, you'd have been better off buying the $250-300 GPU every two or three years than you would be buying a $600 GPU every four to six years. A HD 6950 2GB (three years old $250-300 GPU) is probably a better performer in 2013 games than a HD 4870X2 (six years old $600 GPU). I've gotten myself away from the mentality of "I'm building a PC, it needs to be the best it can be", and into the mentality of "I'm building a PC that will last me a couple of years, then I'll upgrade it or build another if I need more performance". Otherwise you just end up with frustration when your $600 video card is beaten in performance by a $300 video card two years later, or you end up chasing a moving target and constantly buying the latest and greatest, while selling the older stuff at a huge loss.

To tie that tangent back to modding, what I'm getting at is that I'm not really willing to spend a huge amount of time modding something that I'm going to get rid of in a couple of years, and I think a lot of people are on the same page. Technology is moving fast, and I'd hate to build a mod around a specific set of hardware, only for it to be totally outdated in the near future. I've lost the emotional attachment to my PC hardware that I used to have when I started, since I've been through enough of it. So I'm not going to do a totally customized enclosure that's only going to fit my current mobo, because that probably won't be the mobo I'm using in a few years. It just happened recently to me - I had pretty well color-coordinated my interior (everything was red and black), and then my video card died and I RMA'ed it. The new one was teal. If I had spent $$ on individually sleeved red cables and on painting the top fin of my heatsink in red and black like I had considered at the time, I'd be SOL.

I've also had experiences with having hard to troubleshoot problems and unexpected hardware failures. There are not many things that are more frustrating than spending hours carefully putting together something, only to have to take it apart because it doesn't work. Those beautifully managed cables look good, but they're a total PITA when your mobo gets recalled and you've got to tear everything out and start fresh.

That's kinda my criteria to keep in mind with modding - am I going to hate having to work on this computer in the future? I rather have a stock case with thumbscrews, nice tool-less drive bays, a roomy interior, fan filters, etc. than a custom one that looks really cool but is hard to take apart.

So where am I going with this? It's a couple things
- Popular modding become more professionalized, makes regular people feel discouraged to even try
- Cases become far more stylish and have better airflow
- Custom watercooling loops become less neccessary due to closed-loop coolers and more efficient heatsinks
- Styles trend towards more classy and subtle, less bright and garish
- The first wave of late 90s / early 2000s modders doesn't get as emotionally attached to their current hardware now that they've been through a few cycles of hardware, and have likely stopped using a modded case they used to be very proud of due to outdated form factor / configuration / airflow / accessibility / style.
 
Great Topic!

Speaking as both modder and online store that makes niche parts for retailers since 2001, our sales have grown exponentially over past 3 years, the hobby isn't dying.

Popularity of Modding is only appearing to be decreasing because more people are sharing their projects on facebook instead of community forums :(

nalc brought up valid points, but you have to consider we now have a generation of "global e-commerce" consumers that didn't exist in early 2000s. We're shipping screws overseas on weekly basis, Yes, items that most people could find at their local hardware store... This is the era we live in now... pretty crazy.
 
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I think its that a lot of us are older and just don't have the time. the majority of us have been a part of Hard for 4-10 years. As we got older Real life has taken over. At least thats my excuse :p
 
FalconSS said:
I think its that a lot of us are older and just don't have the time. the majority of us have been a part of Hard for 4-10 years. As we got older Real life has taken over. At least thats my excuse :p
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This sentiment. Although, I did just dig out my old Aopen HX08 from storage. I probably will mod it this winter. :D
 
I think the reasons have been answered multiple times.
I didn't have the time or money when I was younger to mod to the extremes that I wanted, primarily because I spent all of my money on my Jeeps and stereo system. Now, I have the money, tools and talent (or at least the willingness to try until I inadvertently cut my fingers off), but still not the time, thanks to work, MBA, bills, and more Jeeps. I have a workshop loaded with cases, consoles and other projects that I want to work on, but I won't have the time available until Summer 2014 when I graduate.
As for the worklogs, I still occasionally see some good stuff, but not like in the old days. Long before I started posting on [H] I was viewing the worklogs. I don't care at all for the sponsored stuff - I'm not denying that it's good, but I'm a fan of personal effort and design. My favorite mod ever was the Doom 3 case on this forum back around 2004 I believe.
 
I remember being on the forums when watercooling was early and people were milling their own waterblocks on their drill presses at home. Some of those designs came into their own as what are now popular company designs. It was cool to see the beginnings.

I doubt too many people mill their own water blocks on drill presses any more. :)

I remember the cobbled-together socket/cartridge CPUs wired with DIP switches and custom heat sinks for overclocking, too. Not much need for that nonsense anymore!
 
Fenris_Ulf said:
Case modding used to (a dozen years ago) be done by people with skill and very few good tools. Nothing was pre-made, cases came in beige, everything had to be adapted from parts from auto and home improvement stores, and maybe only 5% of cases were ever modded. Now cases come in a rainbow of colors with windows, lights, etc, power supplies are modular and sleeved and come in more than industrial grey, optical drives come in more than beige, and even water cooling is mainstream and pre-built. Honestly, it's just Legos that anyone can do. To really go above and beyond takes lots of expensive tools that are beyond the average home builder - laser cutters, waterjets, CNC mills, spray booths, etc.
It's like custom cars - what used to be a few mods to personalize a vehicle has evolved into needing a Chip Foose level of craftsmanship to even get a second look. And for many of us first generation modders, life has caught up and the responsibilities of jobs and family take up alot of our time and finances.
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Very well said man.
 
Thanks. I still do small mods to improve performance like putting new heatsinks on video cards, custom fan mounts, etc. The last serious case mod I did was building a mini ITX case out of wood, but that was a year ago. Next on my list is a custom headphone stand/amp/dac but it's hard to find the time with job and family responsibilities.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Time... and tools can be expensive... but mainly time...
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I've recently considered doing a few cool mods, but once I added up the cost, I could have just bough a high-end case with those features.
Also, modded cases have poor resale value. Once you mod it, it yours forever or you won't get back anywhere close to what you put into it.
 
honestly i just wish i could find some super boring beige cases that i can hack up and paint :) you just cant really buy anything as boring as you used to anymore

i don't even care if it's something people are going to go nuts over anything. i just want a good base to get back to some old school fun modding.

i agree that most of the current cases you can buy are already optimized for airflow, style, and what have you, but i find them all to be fairly boring and uninspired...

sure they look "cool" i suppose, but there is nothing that really shows any of the users character. modding in my mind was always putting something together that made your rig perform better, but also had some personal touch to it, something that said "this is my case".

just my double penny on the subject, i could ramble for days on this subject but i wont :)
 
Fenris_Ulf said:
Case modding used to (a dozen years ago) be done by people with skill and very few good tools. Nothing was pre-made, cases came in beige, everything had to be adapted from parts from auto and home improvement stores, and maybe only 5% of cases were ever modded. Now cases come in a rainbow of colors with windows, lights, etc, power supplies are modular and sleeved and come in more than industrial grey, optical drives come in more than beige, and even water cooling is mainstream and pre-built. Honestly, it's just Legos that anyone can do. To really go above and beyond takes lots of expensive tools that are beyond the average home builder - laser cutters, waterjets, CNC mills, spray booths, etc.
It's like custom cars - what used to be a few mods to personalize a vehicle has evolved into needing a Chip Foose level of craftsmanship to even get a second look. And for many of us first generation modders, life has caught up and the responsibilities of jobs and family take up alot of our time and finances.
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Beautifully stated...
 
Reading this genuine discussion makes me feel like an old geezer with my rose tinted goggles talking about the good old days......
 
The only modding I ever do these days is ghetto modding. Cars, computers, houses, you name it I prefer it to the real deal as its not time consuming and it's pretty much free, but most of all it's function over form. All you need is time on your hands and some tools. It's the speed running of gaming.
 
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