1. Seagates for me have been the most reliable. 2. For video cards, consider Quadro NVS 285/280. You can pick them up cheap on eBay... workstation cards, designed for trading-like activities.
Asus and Gigabyte both make good motherboards suitable for the core2s. I did a bit of a web search (start with tomshardware and anandtech) to decide which to buy.
Rebuilt mine for $450. New motherboard ($50), new processor (3 gig dual core $150), new RAM, new HD. Plenty of speed for trading.
I want to get a hardware RAID 1 / 10 / 1E controller. I'm probably going to get this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003 I might go w/ a single array instead of 2 arrays, either 4X 150GB 10K RPM drives on RAID 1E, or 4X 500GB drives on RAID 5. The drives really arn't that expensive. The reason for the space is so that I can store market data. If I do the 500 GB array, I might add in this for a boot drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822116015R
How much market data are you intending to store ? I have 5 years of 1 min data for all the SP500 stocks, some futures 1 min data, futures tick data, and some futures L2 data in a MySQL database and it's only about 16 GByte. More importantly where are you going to get the data from ? You really won't need this sort of capacity unless you buy a tick database, and they cost serious money.
Shoot for the moon............price means nothing to a guy of your status. .. When building a new box, go latest, greatest then you can skip next upgrade cycle and still be "good to go". When driving by girlfriends house you want a BMW not a Pinto. PS, stay away from first generation 880 video cards. Last i read about them is they run super hot. Next generation cards will be a lot less heat. trading you need only NVS nvidia cards..... KEEP trading machine away from games...........FWIW. When you mix business with pleasure it gets the best of men and women in trouble. .. :eek:
As far as graphics cards are concerned consider a motherboard that supports SLI and get two PCIe Geforce SLI graphics card cheap.. thus you can use more then one monitor easily but when you want to game, you can install a bridge between the cards. Often two <$100 graphics cards will outperform graphics cards that cost >$300. So when you want to play add the bridge, and when you want to trade remove the bridge and enjoy multi-monitors. Building your own system is relatively easy. I've done it a few times. Keep in mind though, a few years ago building your own system would be a result in a huge savings for the same amount of performance. Nowadays, isn't that not great since companies like Dell have contracts where they buy parts/software in bulk and get HUGE discounts. You'll find out when you start purchasing OS software. But it's always good to have a PC especially designed for your needs.
If this is a computer for trading, do not use raid0. Hard drives die, you double your chances of failure with raid0. Use only a redundant raid level such as 1/5/6.
Demoship, definitely doable for 3k. I'd go the mwave route, and have someone build the computer and burn it in for you. www.mwave.com possibly www.zipzoomfly.com for ram (bottom dropped out of the memory market recently) www.memoryx.net If you are looking for mission critical applications, which you seem to be doing judging from those RAIDs, then you might wanna think about hard drive coolers also, which will increase the life of your drives, and a big ass UPS - something around 2000va, but definitely not less than 800va with your monitor situation... and if this is a home consideration and the internet is part of those mission critical apps (data feed perhaps), don't forget to plug your DSL modem and router into the UPS! If it's not, disregard that last part. just my .02
I am in the process of building my rig to replace my current AMD64 3500+... It's running 50-60% CPU utilization + occasional 100% spikes. Here are the cost Total 755 Tax 817.2875 Type Price Note CPU 230 e6600 M/B 100 GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 Mem 95 WINTEC AMPX 2x1GB DDR2 800 HD 130 500gb maxtor sata300 Heatsink 30 Cooler Master Hyper TX Case 120 Antec P180B PS 50 Antec 500W PS I have a 7600GS PCI-E + 5200 PCI from my current computer that I am going to reuse, so no video card. M/B + Mem are coming on monday I like my machine nice & quiet, The case+PS are on the expensive side