Go to ebay and search "geforce 8600GT" and sort by "price + shipping: lowest first" I have no clue what that guy is talking about by saying anyone without LED backlit monitors is losing money... I also am certain that our eyes can only process refresh rates as fast as ~20ms therefore arguing that you notice a difference is BS. Most of the "square" or 5:4 aspect ratio monitors are not led backlit and most trading firms and profitable traders I know use this type of monitor. Go out to Newegg or the Dell factory outlet and buy some open box or refurbished 19 or 20" flat panel (not widescreen) monitors, attach two bual DVI $10-$30 video cards and call it a day. You can really notice a clearer picture with DVI vs VGA but the LED backlit argument is nonsense.
LED is not no sense, as far as anything but LED today is silliness. The Florsecent backlighting really is for last decade and beyond... one doesn't realize How yellow the whites on LCDs are until they see it next to an LED! Why would anyone buy a square monitor? Most firms you've heard of? Maybe most firms you heard of before 2007... stop the nonsense and buy a 1080p monitor, because it's a fact it's the beat value and best quality. The other option is to go higher res with a 2560x**** monitor (led only).
*btw, tigerdirect.com has the beat prices, at least of the products I bought. Newegg is also good. Buy refurbished and used on eBay? How much money are you trading???
why not? most trading clients are java based which runs just fine on mac including IB. also you can easily dual boot it to win7 if really want to with bootcamp. mac os is linux kernel which is much more secure also. have you seen those 27" imacs monitors, they are huge. 2 of them is all you need in most cases since you can fit so much more on each. what it really buys you is a clean setup with 1 wire going from your imac to the power outlet, and 1 wire going from 2nd monitor to the first. Trying to setup even a dual monitor on a pc will make your desk look like the matrix lab. Not to mention all that fan noise and heat blasting all day long from the computer. also the current generation imac is the most powerful all-in-one, 27" comes with 6970m radeon video card. total cost is $3000, about $1000 more than a multi-monitor pc setup. that's just 20pt on the es mini, i dont see what the big fuss is against going apple.
Don't tell that to guy Kawasaki I bought a mb pro 17" this summer, first Mac - ironically the hardware is nice, especially the enclousure. Osx lion is buggy as he'll but getting better by the day. I'll still install ultimate 64 bit.
Not really - depends on the computer case more than the video card. I don't think they are any more/less noisy than anything else. They are just a plain vanilla video card - not impressive but certanly more than adequate. What I tend to like about them is they stay pretty cool and they don't draw much power - lets not forget that computers are systems and as soon as you start drawing on the system then things heat up, fans get loud, etc. A hot PSU will radiate into the chassis and heat up other things which makes everything less efficient. They are going to be louder than a passive card but for the price just buy one and see for yourself. They certanly are cheap enough.