As a rule, they do not. All of your functions will run 99.99% from RAM. There are exceptions, of course. Two I've identified are (1) tic charts, especially if saved and (2) custom formulas. Load up your trading apps and check the Task manager for CPU usage percentage. Then you won't have to "assume".
We used to have dual core or even single core. That's true. Heck we used to use XT or 486 to trade just the same too. But things changed over time, the market changed. We trade in decimals, market prints are faster, more market makers, level 2 changes many times in sub seconds. Do you need a powerful CPU? It depends on how you trade. Do you need a powerful CPU for charting? It depends on how you set up your charts. Do you need a powerful CPU if you have many indicators? It depends on what indicator(s) you use! Not all indicators are created equal. For example, MACD - moving averages... those are straight-forward. But when you get to Bollinger Bands, which does a square root (big CPU power sucker, as all scientific functions, logarithm functions) of summation of squares. And what periodicity do you use. The standard 20 would be light (look back only 20 bars). Try to play with something like that: change the look back period to 200 on a Bollinger Bands just for kicks. The "Squeeze" indicator - based on Bollinger Bands. And I developed some multi-squeeze indicators... when the market runs fast, my TradeStation charts instantly froze (thus prompted me to upgrade to i7-930 about three years ago). Also, we are in a relatively quiet time since year 2008. I remember trading on vacation in September from a hotel when the Fed and Paulson did this and that, driving the market went extreme, to up, and down and back and forth. I watched GS can dance around for $10 in minutes! The spread was $1! And that was only a $100 stock at the time! The markets are relatively quiet since 2008. When volatility comes back to the market (or it may not come back for a long time, you never know), price prints will go fast. Market maker quote will change much faster. More communication between your broker and your computer will happen. Indicators will be recalcuated many times over. When USA rigs up another few trillion dollars debt, Starbuck coffees selling at $10 a cup, USA announces intention that we will default on our loan... Have you ever driven in Los Angeles Area? Have you ever passed by the San Gabriel River or Los Angeles River from the freeway? Sometimes I passed by those rivers, I saw that the government built the river water channels so wide - and you must have seen it from movies like Grease where they raced cars in the water channel. I wondered about that... The river was only a tiny creek. Los Angeles is so dry all the time! Why built a river channel so wide??? What a waste of concrete! The answer will come to you when you drive there again during a winter rain storm. And you see why they overbuilt the river channel. No you don't need it 99% of the days. Like Los Angeles. But that one day when you need it, and you don't have it. It takes you out for good.
i3 is plenty fast to process quotes..pay more attention to GPU when running multiple screens! That's where the money shot is.. http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-DL-D...1376927760&sr=8-1&keywords=sapphire+7770+flex see all my reviews
I think if I were to build an i3 as a backup it could work, as it stands my backup system can't run my monitors. Advantage with these new Z87 chipsets is they let you run 3 monitors off of the integrated video - in addition to the video card outputs. But it would probably be a lot safer to get an i5 or i7 just to be prepared.
I don't think that is the case in most circumstances. The GPU is the last thing I worry about. Powerful GPU for charting is just an absolute waste. All the powerful calculations, photo-realism, how many millions of polygons per second, light sources, shading, translucency, etc... for drawing some squiggly lines that are not even 3-D? In one of the 16 primary colors? Being capable to support the multiple monitors, yes. But many low-end display cards can do that just fine. How the squggly lines (indicators) look? They are generated by your CPU before the graphics entities (i.e. texts and lines, even no polygons are involved) are processed by your GPU to translate into video signals to be displayed on the monitors.
I'm with Boli on this subject. You don't build a system for average daily use. You build it for when theives crash the planet and you don't want to be taken out by it.
How much memory do you recommend just to run WIN8.1 most efficiently not counting your trading programs? Are SSD's reliable enough now to trade from them, and could an SSD speed up quote processing by your system?
I have used an i3 and have ran 2 trading platforms on it at the same time with no issues. I guess it really depends how many charts you plan to open at once, me I do 4 charts with one platform and 1 with the other.
8GB RAM is almost always plenty. Besides if your really need more, you can add. (I use 4GB, and it's plenty.... but if you wanted to run a RAMDISK, 8GB would be preferable.) SSDs are MORE reliable than HDDs, but will not "speed up" quote processing... that's all done in RAM until written to archive.