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I'm resurrecting this thread to ask a comp power question rather than starting a new thread. Not sure if anyone will read it.
Anyway. I am deciding between 4 core processor and 6 core. I know I am going to get the answer that it won't matter but specifically I am wondering if anyone has experience or opinions on how more cores would handle range charts during intense moments of volume/volatility. I know that range charts are far more computationally taxing on the system and I would like to add more range charts to my layout but I have a single core now and it is totally maxed out with 3 range charts and 9 time charts.
I use a lot of charts because I like to watch correlations and money flows from market to market therefore I have NQ, ES, DAX, Euro, Yen, Oil, Gold, 30yr, 10 yr, etc etc etc all running at once.
Anyone have a thought as to whether the extra two cores will improve system performance AND perhaps more importantly will NinjaTrader 7 even use all the cores to begin with?
NT 7 is multithreaded and does use the multiple cores available. If you are doing some extensive backtesting each core you have really speeds things up.
However for displaying multiple charts/windows etc, a 4 core or even 2 core processor would probably do fine and RAM would really be more important in that instance. Get lots of good, fast RAM.
+1 on this. I bought at i7 930 on the cheap. I've converted most of my stuff to NT 7. From what I see, NT7 won't use the hyperthreaded cores but hits the 4 main cores consistently in backtesting/optimizations. Not sure if anyone can confirm the lack of hyperthreading?
I turned hyperthreading off and have the 4 normal cores running at 4.2Ghz stable....but the key was matching this with very quick RAM. I think 4 cores is fine...you'll need as much RAM as you can get. DDR3 is pretty cheap these days. If you go Intel the i7's are Tri-Core. AMD is dual i believe.
I would strongly encourage you to get a reallly good power supply too with good Amps.
Thanks for the advice. Based on it and other posts on here I've decided to scale back the comp to something less expensive.
Thinking an AMD Phenom II X4 3.2GHz
Power supply is 550w
memory is 8gb ddr3 1600
HD is 640gm 6.0 sata 7200rpm
video cards I'm not sure about maybe radeon 4550 512mb x 2
this is scaled back from a 6 core with a SSD, same ram and 2 1gb radeons
Any thoughts on this set up?
Is it enough ram? is the SSD worth the money? or is a fast 6.0gb/s sata hd enough? Power supply is only 550w is that enough?
It's plenty for a trading box. I would focus on quality PSU (not necessarily more wattage), focus on quiet or near silent PSU and GPU, an aftermarket CPU heatsink+fan (again for quietness).
An SSD will make your charting application load faster, but once it's loaded will make zero difference really. Personally I would rather see you save your money and either buy a 800W UPS (CyberPower for instance) or get an external 1TB backup drive so you can backup your system nightly or weekly --- both of those are better investments than an SSD in my opinion, for a trading machine.
With a Black edition CPU the multiplier is unlocked so you can OC by just increasing the multiplier. You need a bios that allows that though but it is common in machines that aren't bought in stores. The motherboard I have is here. BTW I put together a i7 Sandy Bridge machine for my neighbor and the motherboard was $100 more, some of the SATA ports were still SATA II and not all of the PCIe video slots were full speed. I don't think that machine would be any better for trading either.
I semi agree here but I would never go without an SSD now. If I have to restart NT in the trading day the last thing I want is to wait for it to start up and get the charts going. Heaven forbid the computer need rebooting too. With a SSD the boot time can be 20 - 30 seconds. If I need to start Skype, start Outlook (normally slowww) or open a browser (slowww Firefox) there is no wait at all. To me these are important on my machine for my business.
