How fast/what kind of specs does your computer need to be to trade. Most importantly, Why? What would be the consequence to having sub-standard equipment?
My set-up is a 2.8 Pentium with a gig of memory with high-speed internet (cable). It's adequate. I find for my type of work, monitoring 6 to 8 real-time markets all the time during the day session hours, I needed something a bit more than what I had, which was a 2.0 w/ 512 gigs. Never fudge on equipment / data and internet feed for your trading business.
What happens if you do skimp on hardware? I've got 2 laptops, 1 gig processor each...memory...haven't a clue....but definitely less than 512. What would be the problem? Connection is fast, but the computers are obviously a little slower than yours. Whats the negative?
amd xp 2000+ 1gig two fx5200 128 video drives 4 17 lcd's cpu utilization is around 50% or so. 3 yearold chip. still works great. im going to upgrade when the dual core amd gets a bit cheaper. it depends on what you do. as a discretionary trader, your hardware should be fine. if you have alot of software crunching data, watch for your cpu utilization. especially during the open/close/greenspan days.
Get lots of quality RAM. Here's an interesting piece: How much RAM is enough for a trading computer system?
It's quite interesting new Dual Core processors of Intel for trading applications. Dual core processor with multithreading provides 4 logical processors. In a multitasking environment different applications could be served by separate processors providing at least better system response and may be higher performance of all applications. For a trading setup consisting of a set of running applications running in parallel: - broker trading front end - real time charting - scanning - may be development tool the system consisting of 4GB RAM and dual core multithreading processor would be quite cheap and at the same time enough powerful computing environment. The only point that these processors are quite new and the experience and test reports are missing.