2D cards like the NVS are specifically designed with lower clock speeds and voltage, gaming cards pump the highest voltage and clock speed they can get. as for the monitors, I havnt tried using 4 1920x1200 monitors so I cant answer that for you, sorry.
http://www.sharkeyextreme.com/guides/index.php Here is a good guide... lays out bang for you buck... geared more towards gaming but you can use bits and pieces for your trading station..
I don't know why people spend $3k on a trading computer. Is it the desire to buy expensive toys that do 10x as much as you need? My trading computer is a 8-year old machine that wouldn't even fetch $20 on ebay (not including the monitor, which might be worth $100). If I were to buy a new one, I would have a budget of $450 not including monitor, and I might buy a Dell or something because I don't see a need to build a low-end machine from scratch. You guys are going way overkill. Trading is not that computing intensive. You only need a low-end computer. Just make sure it has 1g ram and you're set. RAID, high-end video card, 500G storage? Come on!!! What freaking trading computer needs 500G hard drive space???????? The only need for a $3k machines are gaming, engineering, or audio/video processing/editing.
The "you don't need to go overboard" group is correct but (lol) you might as well get a good system at a reasonable price point. That means stay just off the bleeding edge. Get: - a core2duo e6600 in a motherboard that will cope with a quadro (so its got sharp timing). - 2GBytes of good ram (good brand, probably 800MHz not 667MHz) matched for performance. - At least one good 200GByte or better hard drive (not sure why you need two except to give you a backup strategy in which case you might be better off with a separate drive so that a virus can't take them both out. - 2 graphic cards is fine. 3D cards are also fine. If reliability is a genuine concern run them underclocked ... why not just slow them down 10% or 20% when using them for trading. You could run two PCIE's so that they provide double the processing power for games (not sure how to do this but I recall that was a feature when I bought my current machine). Trading doesn't need a bleeding edge computer but a very good computer can be purchased for a very reasonable price so you might as well get something nice.
I just built my first rig with help from a few of the tech masters here. I'll also say that there is no way you need to spend 3K on a trading rig. The only thing you need to spend huge bucks on is very nice displays, which are always sweet. If you have never built a computer before, you may consider doing what I did. I went to the computer department at the University with all my components in a bag and I hired one of the grad students there to build the computer for me while I watched him. It was a great, cheap lesson and it is definitely not too hard - the hardest part is knowing how to handle the Windows install. I am going to try to fly solo on the next one, for my sister.
my rig cost about 2100$$ not including monitors, I like good reliable hardware. got 8 monitors . I monitor alot of markets.
If you only need two monitors you can build a very good trading pc for only 600 â 800 $ and you can spend your money on getting two quality monitors. Example ⦠Motherboard ASUS P5B-E plus retail , cpu core 2 duo 4300 or 4400, 2x1 GB of 667 MHz ram, a 250 GB WD sata2 hard disk, a brand name psu unit like seasonic with 450 â 500 Watts output, add a silent ASUS graphic card in the 150 â 200$ range that can handle a double monitor and you are ok. If you want to spent a little more (+200$) then use an 6 series CPU instead of the 4 series and use 800 MHz ram instead of 667 Mhz.
My Maxtors as well... Anyway, why the Raid 1? I would say Raid 0, or no Raid. Disks don't fail often, and also you suggest a 500G backup external drive.
"The only need for a $3k machines are gaming, engineering, or audio/video processing/editing." One reason for having very high spec might be high data crunching requirements e.g Radarscreen or Neoticker with several thousand symbols or something like that. Anothe reason migh be so you don't have to wait a minute for lines to draw when you change symbols. My next PC will be 64 Bit XP Twin quad core with Oh, say 16 GB RAM - but I will wait until I can get it for USD500