Mayhem's interview: Taking the water-cooling world by storm

Mayhem's:As far as getting the ideas, films and technology have a big impact – Aurora for instance came from Star Trek and the warp core engines. I thought wouldn’t it be cool to have that in your PC. We’re working on many new coolants that also take inspiration from films. When we start, it’s literally like using a school chemistry set. You’re playing with tubes and liquids. It’s quite fun really.


Bit-tech: One thing we know you’re very hot on is the safety of your products and the fact they’re non-toxic. We’re not saying to anyone that you can drink them but you’ve gone as far as making them this safe. Why?

Mayhem's:One day when I’d just finished making a particularly bright and vivid coolant my daughter turned round and said ‘Dad, that looks like pop.’ There was just a look of horror on my face when I realised that someone elses kid could mistake the coolant for a drink so since then we’ve been particularly hot on safety. So the coolant is as safe as we can make it and we always use child safety caps. If it’s not safe we won’t sell it basically.

One of the biggest problems with watercooling is that there’s very little regulation. In fact I think as consumers and manufacturers we should look into self-regulation. It would stop potentially unsafe copies of safe products being released, things like that.


Bit-tech: Very true – the water-cooling industry is almost like a magpie industry in that tubing, fittings and pumps have all been traditionally used in other industries but have been adopted by PC enthusiasts.

Mayhem's:I think that’s what still makes it a great hobby – anyone anywhere can do it. You don’t have to have the latest hardware or even the most powerful pumps or biggest radiators – the people that create the most inspiring projects are those that don’t have wads of money but still create some of the best projects you’ll ever see. I thrive on these kinds of projects. You have so many skills – welding, artists, chemists all coming together.


It’s something we look at for sponsoring too – we prefer the creative modder doing something very different and a lot of our profits actually go back in to the community this way – we find it’s a great way of advertising and spreading the word about our product and forum users always give us feedback too. If anyone asks a question about dye on a forum, we’re usually the first to get mentioned which is great.