You are right. I think I should have rewritten my statement as: If you have multiple SLI capable video cards, you want to use the SLI feature, but he MoBo doesn't support SLI, then it won't work. What I was getting at: it takes two to tangle. Both the video card and the motherboard.
Another question. I understood that a graphic card with or without SLI, will work on a Mobo with that technology, but what about an Nvidia card on a MoBo with CrossFire? I've noticed that the Asus P6T SE is cheaper than the P6T. The difference between them is that P6T has SLI and CrossFire whereas P6T SE only has Crossfire.
You are right. I think I should have rewritten my statement as: If you have multiple SLI capable video cards, you want to use the SLI feature, but he MoBo doesn't support SLI, then it won't work. What I was getting at: it takes two to tangle. Both the video card and the motherboard. [/B][/QUOTE] I think that's right. Some mobos come with the disclaimer, "not SLI capable".
It may be hard to answer that question unless you do a side-by-side comparison of the 2 boxes. When I shopped around, I think the price difference between the i5 boxes and i7 boxes was about $300 or so. The list price difference between the 2 CPU chips is only $100. But of course the MoBo and power supply and stuff would need to be different too. The passmark score for i5 is about 4200. i7 930: 5800 It's hard to answer that question too because not all indicators are created equal. I used to have a couple of AMD boxes, Athlon X2 chip, only passmark around 1300. They worked okay for a couple of years. But as soon as I introduced a new custom indicator that I developed, which is based on Bollinger Bands.... all charts went down to their knees. Bollinger Bands use square roots of some summations of squares... and for every increment in periodicity it needs to calculate that many more times... (And I increased the periodicity by a factor of 3). So it is really hard to generalize. If you have an existing box running that config that you mentioned... do a monitoring on the CPU usage. Compare the passmark scores between your CPU and i5/i7. You may get some ideas. Another way to think of it is to spend $200-$300 more to pave the road for the future. When your trading needs do increase, you may be better off with i7 than otherwise.
You should forget SLI and Crossfire entirely when it comes to multi-monitor display. If a mobo has SLI/Crossfire capability, it's OK... won't hurt anything, but it won't be used. If a mobo does not have SLI/Crossfire, that's OK too... as it's not necessary nor used for multi-video card/display.
I believe the lowest price per monitor is offered by ATI graphics card with Eyefinity support. You can get one of 5450s (with support for 3 monitors) for less than half the price of an Nvidia NVS 295 (which supports 2 monitors). Read this story.
OK, thanks. Another question, I've talked about the i5 or i7, but what about AMD? A lot cheaper than Intel and regarding performance, tests say that they are very similar in performance, though, I always heard that for mathematical calculations Intel will be always superior. What are your thoughts regarding this?
Intel and AMD are comparable. Trading data and graphics are miniscule compared to the capability of hardware. Doubt you'd ever notice a difference.