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In the market for a new machine, what is important?
i have a dell with 8 gig,ddr3,I.7 it is plenty fast enough for everything i need,if you dont want to have multiple cards you can also use usb external cards for more moniters...sharky
KILLING THE MARKETS DAILY
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I only use 4 monitors and sometimes that seems like a distraction. That link does establish a new low water mark for price on the machine I am looking for. I trade two products, usually three minute timeframe, I look at 6 charts listen to a news feed, run NT7, a browser and BMY arcade. Do I need that kind of machine? DB
From what I've read online, getting an SSD is useful to speed up boot times but it doesn't do a heck of a lot for normal hard drive usage (I may be wrong about this - it's simply what I read). Also, they cost an arm and a leg over a traditional HD.
As for Windows 7 Pro - the big differences there is that Windows 7 Home Premium can only address up to 16gb of RAM, so if you want to be able to handle more, you'll need to have Pro. Also, Windows 7 Pro can log onto domains, while the home versions cannot. Being able to log onto a domain is probably only relevant if you use the machine at work or have a business-grade network at home.
One other thing - you can probably save yourself some $$$ when you buy your machine by buying the upgraded memory separately. When I bought my most recent HP desktop, they wanted something goofy like $120 to add an additional 4GB. Using the Kingston Memory website, I was able to determine what type of memory I needed for this machine and then ordered it off of Amazon.com. I was able to upgrade an additional 8GB for $60.
Finally, as others may have noted, you may want to check out www.passmark.com to spec out different CPU scores. I originally was going to buy an AMD six-core processor but then went ahead and bought an Intel I7-2600 because, although its a quad-core, its CPU score is 50% higher than the AMD I was looking at.
Have you check Dell Outlet? Their XPS 8300 is great. But they do go by fast. The specs is identical to what you have listed, except Ram is 8 or 12gb and the video card is ATI 6770, and they go for like 650 shipped. You might have to use chat to see if they have any inventory. Good luck.
I would agree with Forrest on that one ... if the machine is only for trading, the purveyors of your software should be able to give you technical specs for an optimum operating environment.
The machine I recently bought was for research, and needs a lot of memory and CPU power for various optimizations, scans, etc.
Do you need it? That is subjective, but if your goal is to spend as little money as possible to be able to run your charts, then any 4 year old quad core system with 4GB or more of ram would be enough.
It depends on your exact use, and how you define "enough power". For example, at any given time I have about 20 tabs open in my browser (Chrome), which by itself uses almost 2GB of memory.
I have email open on top of that, I am often using image editing software, encoding videos, and running various background tasks.
If you do any backtesting then you probably want a fast machine.
An i5 2500 with 8GB of ram and no SSD is more than enough. But the price to go from i5 2500 to i7 2600 is pretty small, just like memory is incredibly cheap right now.
I just use my laptop to trade...
Attached to the TV and another monitor that is! (when at home)
Otherwise, trading outside works fine too especially when during a lecture(Yes I'm in college studying)
Laptop specs:
I7 2630
6gb dd3 ram
Standard HDD 650GB NOT an ssd
AMD Radeon HD 6500M ( 2GB ddr3)
Your main focus here would be Graphics memory since as a trading PC you're probably going to be using multiple monitors with high resolutions.
VGA/ Grahics card bus speeds/ cores/ CUDA compatibility shouldnt be a weightage criteria unless you wish to use imaging programs such as Adobe Photoshop etc as imaging programs utilise GPU processing when performing task to accelerate work done.
Ram wise, 4GB should be sufficient unless you wish to multitask. DDR 3 is preffered.
As for the processor, you may want to focus on the amt of cores instead of singular but fast cores or dual cores cause you are running multiple charts/programs at once so it isnt about speed but rather multitasking power here.
Clock speed of the processor shouldnt be an important factor but its important to make sure its at least 2ghz per core unless you wish to do some back testing so a little bit more than that should do the trick as back testing currently only uses 1 core at once unless you're on mt5 which uses all cores at once.
