Matrox G450 MMS vs G200 MMS

My G200 MMS quad video card has been working well for years. But now sometimes when I open a new window temporarily overtop of existing charts, the temporay window does not close all at once. Instead it closes in pieces (corresponding to the charts underneath).

I'm wondering if the extra memory in the G450MMS might resolve this. And if the fan in the G450 MMS is very noisy? Has anyone had experience with both cards and can comment on how much better (?) the G450 MMS is compared to the G200 MMS.

And sometimes I can see a stocks price race ahead in IB Booktrader, while my eSignal charts and T&S freeze up for 5 - 20 seconds. But that may have nothing to do with my video cards.

Thanks
davez

 

i will give you 20 bucks for it.

 

I doubt it is the card. G200 has plenty of memory for trading app's.

 

I have many overlapping charts (many stocks in multiple timeframes) such that I can see the last 15 bars in each time frame at once, or click any one chart to see ~100 bars. So with no overlaps, they might fill twice as many monitors, maybe more. And in some cases, the chart background color changes based on an indicators condition.

I know that 2-D charts are generally not memory or graphics chip intensive, but I thought maybe the overlapping and color changes might be pushing the G200 limits. Do you think 8MB memory/channel in the G200 is still enough for that?

Regards
davez

 

i some 1905fp monitors on a 200 card and it has very capably handled:

1. e$ignal with 20-30 charts over four monitors
2. IRT with several charts
3. QT with about 10-20 charts
4. several internet windows
5. various office apps (word, excell, etc).
6. Adobe Reader
7. broker app (main app and 5 DOMs)
8. IB app and a few charts
9. detached Prophet.net charts

btw, i don't normally run all these things but i wanted to get an idea of how well my system would handle that type of load.

anyway, don't know how that compares to what you have running, but there ya go.

hth

take care

omni

 

Have got got enough memory ? (main memory not video adapter memory). These sort of periodic delays can be caused by paging to/from disk as memory is running low. Number of open windows/charts has got nothing to do with video memory requirements.

 

I have 2GB main memory ....in a 3GHz HT P4 Dell. I've never understood if/how main memory affected the video card and display performance. So when you say the number of open windows has nothing to do with video memory, that suggests:
1. that main memory (or paging) stores all the window data, and
2. that the extra memory in the G450MMS might not make a difference then?

I'm at 16 bit color (vs 32) which reduces video card load, I think.

In windows Task Mgr> Performance> Page File Usage History, the graph plot is always flat and very low. I think that means my page memory is not needed much (i.e. my main memory is not working to capacity)? But then on the Processes tab in Task Mgr, I see many Page Faults - I'm not sure what that means.

In Task Mgr, my CPU Usage curve hovers around 80%, only spiking above that occasionally and for short times.

So I think my CPU and main memory are good enough, and I have DSL. That's why I was wondering if the G200MMS (the oldest component in my setup) is the weak link.

Thanks for your reply
davez

 

Other than Panda Internet Security, I have trading apps only... eSignal (67 windows), IB (3 windows), StockWatchPro (2 windows), and Medved Quotetracker (1 window). I also have a G450 dual card installed. I have a 2nd computer for all non trading apps... word processing, email etc. So it seems like my G200 quad is handling about the same load as yours. So thanks for the feedback that your card is handling it ok.

davez

 

80% CPU is high. I think one of your app's is hogging resources and dragging the system down. I would try it with various app's off to see if things improve dramatically. I'm no expert on this, so I can only tell you my own expereince. I have found certain programs would not work properly on one pc but worked fine on another.

 

You could be right AAA. Both eSignal and StockWatchPro (SWP) use eSignal data. Yet in fast markets, eSignal's Time & Sales would often freeze, or move forward very erratically, while the T&S in SWP manages to keep up. Strange that a 3rd party app can use eSignal data better than eSignal. (I gave up using eSignal T&S). 1 and 5 minute eSignal charts will often freeze up for 5-20 seconds as well in fast markets.

So maybe there is some processing bottleneck associated with eSignal. I use many eSignal efs's (custom scripts) but I'm not real knowledgeable in efs, so the problem could be with one of them.

Regards
davez