Even as the PC market hit the skids in recent years, the hobbyist/home builder market hung in there. People like me, for whom Fry’s Electronics or Micro Center is like a supermarket, kept building and upgrading their systems while HP, Dell and Acer were looking at sales reports and weeping.

We hobbyists may be small in number but we’re keeping a lot of companies alive. CPU Magazine, which caters to home builders, is still publishing monthly when pretty much everyone else has given up on print, and Newegg.com continues to grow.

One prominent name for home builders is about to disappear, though, through no fault of the market or even its own. Zalman Tech, a Korean company known for bringing a lot of innovation in silent PC cooling, might be finished. The firm filed for bankruptcy earlier this week.

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