Cooling
An often overlooked and under-appreciated side of building a trading computer is processor cooling. The processor will not speed up to turbo mode when you need it to without a good cooler. The standard Intel cooler is not good enough to sustain a prolonged (more than a few seconds) run into turbo mode.
A reliable cooler is also important, which is why we avoid the lower-cost pre-packaged water cooling systems from Intel, Corsair, and several others (they are all made by Asetek which has exclusive patent rights to the technology). We did use these devices at one time, but the failure rates are about 5%. This is too high as far as we are concerned. If every component on your trading computer had a 5% failure rate then you would have a very unreliable trading computer. Also, you can get air coolers that perform just as well using properly engineered heat pipe phase transition technology.
