Is watercooling a trading system a bad idea?

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Dart

I'm looking at this Silverstone FT02 case I ordered, and it looks like it allows you to put a very neat water cooling system in it, for near silent operation at full load. The system people use on this case is a huge 180mm x3 cooler, mounted on the bottom of the case on top of the 180mm fans. I could use it to cool my main video card and processor. My video card has fans, which spin up as soon as I'm doing any graphical uses of it. Sounds like a jet on full load.

Are there any reasons not to watercool a trading computer? Words of warning?
 
The only reason to water cool a system is if you're overclocking your CPU/GPU and it stops running due to overheating.

Unless you're running HFT or massive amounts of backtests, I don't see the need other than the coolness factor. Overclocking your CPU is overkill if you're just watching charts or DOMs....

Head over to overclock.net if you want to learn more about overclocking...
 
Quote from blah12345678:

The only reason to water cool a system is if you're overclocking your CPU/GPU and it stops running due to overheating.

Unless you're running HFT or massive amounts of backtests, I don't see the need other than the coolness factor. Overclocking your CPU is overkill if you're just watching charts or DOMs....

Head over to overclock.net if you want to learn more about overclocking...
More...

Or silentpcreview.com if you want to learn about silencing. There is something called underclocking, as an alternative solution for cooling a computer to reduce its noise.

I'm not overclocking, I'm trying to make it silent while under load. These 8 core AMD processors seem to really heat up under a load. Problem is I don't know if it might have a drawback for trading purposes if I put water in there.

An example of a drawback I can foresee, is that it might not be reliable. I've never tried water cooling systems, but if it sprung a leak in the middle of a trade that would be a disaster, not an interruption to entertainment as it would be for an overclocker. Or maybe water pumps fail unexpectedly, that would be just about as bad for a trader.

These 180mm x3 radiators are designed for near passive cooling, so in theory the fans would hardly spin at idle, and under load should be almost silent. Crank up the fan speeds you could overclock, in my application I'd probably have to worry about overheating under just average loads.

An example of this radiator says "untra-low airflow" in the description, and sub 800rpm fans.

http://www.hwlabs.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&Itemid=3
 
Kind of a neat device, but unfortunately I'm running multiple monitors, so I don't think it would work - if it were cheap.
 
The more I look at water cooling, the easier and quicker to do it seems.

Just get a pump/reservoir to mount into two 5.25" bays, cpu and graphics water blocks, a couple radiators, some tubing and corner fittings so you don't crimp the tubing. Then fill it with some distilled water through the front of the 5.25" bay window, add some additives, and it's done. That simple.

The pumps are rated to last 50k hours, so I don't think it would fail mid-trade. That's almost six years of continues use from a cheap little pump. As long as they don't make much noise, which some say they are silent, I'd have gotten rid of just about all the noise for a few hundred bucks.

And whats even better, is just about all the money invested should work on a new build in the future, since the parts don't wear out. And I mean a few years into the future, when an 8 core 4ghz processor seems old and slow.

Drawbacks? You have to change the water out once a year.

I think people are scared of water cooling... water in a computer? No!
 
This pump/reservoir seems rather popular on the FT02 case builds I've seen. Mounts in two 5.25 inch bays. It also takes two high flow pumps mounted on the back. No tricky figuring out somewhere to mount reservoirs and pumps in the case, it's all in the drive bay.

http://koolance.com/rp-452x2-dual-5-25in-reservoir-for-1-2-pmp-450-s-pumps

Just unscrew the thumbscrews on the front to add the water, it looks like this:

attachment.php
 

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Looks like the two pumps work in series, so if one pump stops working correctly the second one continues to work, so a pump failure wouldn't be to problematic, in a trading situation.
 
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