I intend to use E-signal along with Ninjatrader at the same time whilst tracking let's say 5 products / stocks and the Noodles and the S&P-500 on 1 min, 5min, 8min, 13min, 60min, daily, maybe weekly and monthly charts. Inaddition to Times and Sales and Level 2 windows. Perhaps later i will want to do some optimization works and number crunching like mgaberial01 does so i need to know if the desktop specs specified will meet those requirements. I wonder if the Graphics Cards DUAL 1GB AMD RDN HD7470,LP,w/VGA will be good to handle all on four monitor screens x 21.5"; perhaps ultrasharp series from dell. By the way, this is the Maxed out Graphic Card for Dell's Small Form Desktop (9010 Optiplex series). More? Not sure at this stage, but if by doing all the above, the Desktop is already at its limit (either CPU or Memory or Graphic Card or all of them) then i know i will need something more powerful and a small desktop wont cut it, but if by meeting my present demands, the desktop is still at 50% or even 60% efficiency then i think it is good enough?
ok, now that your utilization scenario is clear, I would suggest something different... separate your opts workstation from your trading workstation... spend funds on i7 for the opts and just get an i3 or i5 for the trading one... 8GB on each... and the opts does not need fancy video, just needs default video card with a decent single monitor... IMO of course.
So the specs of the desktop far exceed requirements of trading from a CPU / Memory requirements; what about the Graphic Card proposed, will it meet the trading requirements on 4 screen with all the open windows i specified?
I quoted the cards and SSD's separate for a reason... they can be placed on any PC... so simply put... the video card will be more than capable to handle your requirements...
yes, and no... as I mentioned, depends on what you are doing... because you are doing all the things you want in a single system, you would want to go with i7... but my suggestion is to split them... for the same cost... i3/i5 ($300-400) and i7 ($500-600) refurbished of course... the only thing I buy new are my laptops.. and it all depends, if I can find me a great deal on a return/unused, I get that instead and spend the savings on stuff like more RAM or SSDs... you do not want to tinker with your trading workstation... you care about stability on your order entry and charting platform.. last thing you want to do is tinker too much with that one..
ofthomas, The system i mentioned will be a dedicated trading system, it will not be used for other work. Does that make sense?
read all my prior posts... all my advice is contained within those... but to make it clear, a dedicated trading system would not involve any back testing on that system... only charting and order entry..
So for backtesting i will need another system with high end CPU and memory. Whereas for trading, i will not need as much CPU / Memory Power One system for charting / order entry (with medium specs) and for back testing, an advanced system?