Watch the video for falcon trading systems at 3:35. These guys seems very unprofessional with how they handle the PC's. That guy's just holding the motherboard in his lap just snapping in parts. He's not grounded (http://www.wikihow.com/Ground-Yourself-to-Avoid-Destroying-a-Computer-with-Electrostatic-Discharge ), or wearing any gloves, so his oily ass hands are getting over everything. Then you have the old man listening to his ipod, or maybe its his hearing aid, I don't know, but I love how its just dangling over the PC waiting to get snagged on something. PASS!
It seems that from a price-performance perspective, i7 is a bigger bang for your buck for retail traders using desktops. Similar or better performance at a lower price. Unless you want to run your trading software on a server class machine.
4-6 monitors doesn't necessitate a powerful processor. If you needed something powerful, you likely wouldn't need to ask here. The guys here pushing i7s+ may very well be wasting your money.
My first 4-monitor rig included a TV tuner... ran on a P III, with 4 MB RAM video cards... video requirements for nearly all of today's trading isn't any greater.
I have 36gb in my T5500 with dual w5580 cpus... What do you care what we do with our RAM? Perhaps people do other things than just trade with their machines.
If you don't mind my asking... (1) How much did 36GB of RAM cost when you bought it?, and (2) What is your peak RAM usage?
The box was about $7,500 new and its ECC RAM so its pretty expensive. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148356 So 36GB would cost you roughly $1k. You can get non-ecc RAM for much cheaper though. Peak depends on what its used for. Most of the time it only uses 1-3gb but when I run simulations overnight it can get up to 28-29gb when it loads all of the parameters into memory. So probably 12 hours a day its loaded up and 12 hours its idling at 1.5-3gb used.