Thanks for the detailed responses, and advise. I'm not ready to buy yet, and when I am I will most likely fab my own, but I was just looking at the deals. To me it's interesting to see the evolution of the products even just on amazon. It used to be you could hardly find a cob led on amazon, now they're becoming prolific. And the price drops are cool to pay attention to also. Hey you probably already saw it but I did find a pretty good gem on one of the threads you mentioned.
http://cobkits.com/shop/
I'll probably go here when I decide to pull the trigger. He said tell em six string sent you. Looks like great prices. I'm thinking I'd like to build a six chip fixture for my big cabinet and run it at lower current to keep it running close to peak efficiency.