Remember that laptops are designed with battery life in mind and overheat more with heavy workloads. Laptop processors have several modes of operation and usually are not geared to use their full potential for prolonged period of time.
WOW, like what type of trading are you doing? I use to get custom built stuff all the time, what a waste of bucks. Now I have two laptops, one for charting and diff for platform, doms, buy them on black Monday, 2 of everything so I have backup each year. I just make sure it has min 16 gig ram, wired mouse as I need middle button, I don't like wired mouse at all, too small for my hand. I don't have any DVD rom, no extras, one is 17 inch screen and other 15, internet want fast, but it always comes down to my speed of identifying signals and not so much as equipment. I like the SSD and I get 500 or smaller, even on email laptop after 3 years just used 90 gigs. Hardest game I play is hearts, LOL. If you day trading 1-2 markets, don't need extra monitor, at least me. Getting fastest CPU great for back testing, but data only comes in so fast. I suppose if you day trading stocks, much data trying to go in. Why not just hook up to 60" wall monitor? Lots of real estate there?
I run 1 42 inch monitor and 2 27 ultra widescreen monitors .. so I need a strong desktop to run them all
My Windows 10 computer malfunctioned today -- I downloaded some virus, tried everything...antivirus spybot etc tools...nothing worked. I even edited the registry values...that's when things really started to act/look weird. (I downloaded what I thought was a hack to get a free password for a program, to get the full version; DFX Audio Enhancer) Long story short....I popped in my backup/old Windows 7 hard drive-- I feel back right at home. I love Windows 7. feels more...traditional PC. everything's more brighter and evident. -- i like the side gadgets too.
$1,500 for a trading computer? Sheesh! I've usually spent $200-$300 on them... Xeon workstations. Of course if you want to also game on your trading computer, that's a different story.
Mines a $200 netbook. It used to freeze up for 10 seconds when I put a trade on when I was using ninjatrader.
Total overkill, you can build a very powerful PC (without monitors) for $550-$600. I wanted to do a budget build myself as I couldn't justify spending a lot for something that is worthless in a few years, got a desktop+monitor for under $500.