Ok, so ill pick up the 650 watt power supply. I see they have a 30 gig SSD but will that be suitable for my limited budget? This would of course be paired with a 7200. As far as the CPU goes: why do you suggest a cheaper one?
A 650 W power supply over 500 W may or may not be that big a difference, especially if you are running only 1 video card (instead of 3 for example). But if the price difference is not big, you can always use a higher rating power supply. I don't think it's all the big a deal to use SSD or higher speed HD. How often do you start your trading app? Once a day or once every 5 minutes? Would waiting an extra 30 seconds to 1 minute make such a big difference? The CPU speed, however, is important. The faster a chip is, the faster it can populate the charts with indicators/etc that need calculations through out the day. If budget is limited, I guess it helps to figure out your priorities.
I run all on 2 Raid 0 SSD drives. Beats any 10K drive by a factor of 3 at least. Best money i spent on my hardware.
SSD drives are great and certainly faster but you should be more concerned with the overall package. I guarantee this system is plenty fast enough. You could game on it with the latest games as well just replace the first 9500gt with a newer Nvidia card they should still work together if you stick with same manufacturer. The 9500gt uses same GPU as Nvidia 290's http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160457795149&ssPageName=ADME:L:LCA:US:1123
Thanks but thereâs not a chance in hell Iâm paying 1000 dollars for your used computer.... And as for the computer games: like I said, they donât matter to me. I'm in college. I'd rather spend my free time binge drinking and hunting.
For trading you don't need a 500GB harddrive, big drives are for porn. Go for the Intel X25 series SSD instead (slow 40G or fast 80G depending on your budget). Graphics - 2 DVI outputs are required so I'd go for this one - MSI GTS 250, great price for what it is and it's quite silent even though it doesn't look so. EDIT: This is as cheap as it can get with graphics without compromising on quality: eVGA 9500GT $45
I've used the raptors in the past and have not noticed the substantial improvement in boot up times. Someone had did something to my registry files and that helped.
It is not just about the initial load. When your program operates, it loads files from the disk to run. This is where the much faster read speeds come in. Programs do not cache all information and files into ram. Even files that are cached into ram are often "pushed" out due to size allotment meaning that once again, data has to be read from the hd. In addition, for algorithmic trading and backtesting, there are a lot of potential hd read/write operations occuring meaning that a higher rpm drive/ssd drive would increase performance. In summary, a higher quality hd isn't meant to just improve initial load times, but overall application performance depending on the application. It is very rare to not notice a sizeable improvement in performance when going from a 7200 rpm drive to a 10k rpm drive. It is even rarer that any changes have to manually be made to the os to make usage of the extra rpm. As is the nature of the universe, even generally consistent outcomes have their occasional exceptions.
i can confirm that. every part of PC does have certain purpose. you can pick what you need and benefit from it or just waste your dollars on some useless(for you) s**t 10K rpm are working great for me,when i have to insert 1000's of pieces of data from live stream into my database. or work with my binary files database. that's where i can see the difference between 7K rpm and 10K drives. huge difference
Once again, thank you all for your input. Correct me if Iâm wrong, but what I'm gathering from this thread is that the CPU is not as important as the memory or drive? Putting money toward the memory/drive, rather than CPU, equates to more âbang for the buckâ.