I'm building my own system with the help of a friend who is a gamer but I'm a bit concerned that the parts he recommends are biased towards gaming rather than trading. I'll be running two monitors, although I may include more monitors later. The programs I'll be running are MBTrading Navigator together with a memory intensive third party automated trading tool, Excel and IE with esignal and Reuters running. I'm looking for system performance that allows me to send orders instantaneously - or at least no delays that would likely make a difference. I'm looking for optimal price-performance balance and these components have been suggested: Motherboard: ASUS P5NSLI . Cost is about £75. My reasoning is this is a cheap but decent motherboard and that I currently only need 2 monitors but it will be easy to upgrade to a 4 monitor system by adding another video card. Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400. Cost is about £150. RAM: 2GB Corsair KIT (2x1GB) DDR2-667MHz, 128Mx64, non-ECC, 2x200, SODIMM, Unbuffered, CL4, L/T WTY. Cost is about £160. Patriot or ocz RAM was recommended but that Corsair is cheaper for the same specs. Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB DDR3 for about £70. If you're American and the prices seem a bit high, those are the cheapest prices in the UK. Any comments on these components? I don't want to sell myself short but I don't want to waste money either.
E6400 is a good price/performance choice GIGABYTE 965P-DS3 Motherboard is the best price/performance motherboard around but you have monitor specific requirements G.Skill F2-6400PHU2-2GBHZ 2GB is a great bargain if you can find it over there And if you can... the 7600 GT, you never know when you might want to kill aliens after a bad day on the market and it is the current price/performance champ Dont be worried about a gamer putting it together, he'll know what he is doing and a fast gaming system is far more intensive than any business orientated system so you will have the most bang for buck and longevity guaranteed
you might want to check out newegg.com c if theyll ship to uk they have some great deals. intel2duo6400<$224 us/118.gbp corsairxms2 ddr2 675 $275.us/ 145.gbp have you planned on an additional hard drive for raid.? if you were thinking of adding a additional video card later i would install it in now instead of hasseling with it later.
I do not read your concerns about reliability? Us traders need to have reliability much more than the short lived speed of a quarter-miler. Think about heat and speed...your gamer friend prolly wants liquid cooling in what should be your 2D Dell on the cheap... Look....I have been through all of this...right here in ET...and the traders are correct! You do not need hex-core 3D super computing for reuters and your various tools you use... Have a friend send you a Dell or one of these configured computers off the net... http://www.cyberpowersystem.com/ (your friend will like this site) Michael B.
check out his one; he delivers in the UK. Has excellent ratings on ebay. http://www.ankermann-pc.co.uk/
Thanks for the replies. Buying any computers or parts from the US is a non-starter due to shipping and customs issues. As for the hard drive, I do need programs to write from and read to text files on the hard drive but I assume that isn't going to be an issue so I'm thinking of just buying a cheap 100GB hard drive. You can build your own high-spec system for cheaper than ordering a low-end Dell and it's also more educational. As for the motherboard, I've been advised that running the SLI motherboard with 2 video cards would offer better performance than a more expensive quad video card. Would you agree with that?
You do not need SLI... you do not need hardware education... your are a trader for gawds sakes... sheesh...a litte 40gb HD is sufficient for what you do...heck get the 100 gb 10k rpm drive if you must by western digital... you surely are not going to mix your home media experience in your trading computer!!!! just get a couple of dual matrox's assuming you have the slots...your just using 2D and do not need combined/shared memory that SLI gives...
Unless you are using the machine for gaming, you definately don't need SLI. You would probably derive next to zero benefit. And if you are considering using several monitors in the future, you should consider fanless video cards (eg NVS280/285) for reasons of noise, reliability and low heat. ALso two twin head cards tend to be cheaper and easier to obtain on ebay than quads. Added advantage - if one fails, you've still got the other.
I have a Core 2 Duo E6600 overclocked to 3.2GHz... and baby that makes me a better trader because...... I feel the need..... the need for speed