eeut84, Right on. I finished a box a few months ago for order entry only. It has an E8400 in it because at the time it was best chip for the money and still is. I run it from approx 0900 EST until approx 1625 EST when i get the days settlement price for the ES. I have overclocked the cpu from stock 3.0 to 4.0 and never took the voltage up a notch. I have it set now at 3.6 + and never had a problem. Since watercooled i could go 4 and stay there but no real need. I run 4 g memory (shows 3 in vista business), running 2 raptors 10K hhd's in Raid-0. Am not concerned about a quad chip because my trading is not complicated at all. I will consider going 64 bit os when the next generation 32 NM intel chips hit the street. PS: I know the cpu is wondering when i will put some heat to it. Haha First box i ever did with water cooling and to understate: It runs cool. PS: I bought an extra xp pro cd and it sits in closet waiting, i bet in 2 years xp pro will still be better for a trader like me than Windows 7. I bet 32 bit will still be fine and the same for dual core chips. Software development is no where close to what the hardware can do. Hard drives are the holdup as it is now. My type of trading does not need 64bit os and 8g of ram. KISS works just fine thank you. Good trading to everyone. Especially me,
This new case makes me want to build one: http://www.antec.com/usa/productImage.php?id=15125&lan=us http://www.antec.com/usa/productDetails.php?lan=us&id=15125
FYI: I'm running a QX6850 (quad) Core2 Extreme 1333 fsb w 4gb (1x4gb) DDR3 1333 OCZ Platinum on a Asus P5K64WS (1333 fsb) w/ WinXP Pro X64 and the case is cold to the touch. It has never missed a beat in all this volatility. I have four (4) PCIeX16 slots and at max buildout I can have 16 monitors if I choose to utilize quadro fanless cards. Today I use 8800 ultra's (I know it's overkill using 3D cards for trading but I did not know better when I built the system). Not trying to brag but letting you know what I have found to work well for me. I don't understand why people pay for high fsb mobo's and cpu's yet use low fsb ram (like DDR2 667 mhz). It just does not make sense to me. Posters please feel free to argue this point. I enjoy learing and hearing other's points of view.
Interesting about the RAM speed... Tom's Hardware did a story something about, "Extending the life of your RAM"... They compared real application performance on various RAM speeds and concluded, "the RAM speed makes no difference"... I know, this is heresy. But they showed various tasks.. Super Pi, this and that.... and showed there was virtually zero difference between DDR-266 and DDR2-667! I imagine most would be shocked to see this, and the only place one RAM appears to outperform another is in bench tests. I'm not sure, and somebody please chime in here... but I believe the reason there appears to be no difference is because virtually any modern RAM exceeds the capability of the rest of the system by a factor of 1000x. For example, isn't the rated "speed" of DDR2-667 something like 8.6GB/s? Shoot, 8GB of data would be a lot for a trading rig in a MONTH, let alone in a second. Is this right? I've tested DDR2-533 and DDR2-800 in my trading rig and I can't see any difference at all at any time. In other words, faster RAM is more a marketing gimmick* than of practical value... ?? *Computer and component makers wouldn't try to pull this on us, would they?
Whether RAM speed makes a difference will depend on how many Level II CPU cache misses are being generated by the app(s) in use. If memory references are "localized" and mostly can be satisfied by the cache, then memory speed will be less significant. If an app is randomly accessing memory all over it's (large) memory space, then faster memory should improve performance. As an example of an app that might "randomly" jump all over memory, consider accessing lots of arrays (eg time series) and looking up a particular time stamp in each by using a "binary chop" search. Incidently, this is why server class CPUs have traditionally had larger Level II caches (though desktops have mostly caught up now). Servers tend to have a lot more processes and threads running which causes more "random" access over the whole memory space.
All I know is I spent more hours then my time was worth to try to find out how fsb/ cpu speed/ ram speed/ etc. all works or does not work together and the only info I could seem to come up with was OCZ telling me that if my RAM speed was slower then the other speeds that's where my bottlenecks would be. Having suffered through Windows 95, 98, this and that seeing lock ups all I wanted was something that was hevier duty then anything that would be thrown against it, and that's what I got when I built this system. It works. Whether it cost $2k or $5k is moot as long as it works. One lockup can cost much more then the $3k difference in trading. As a boater all my life we have a saying "I would rather be on shore wishing I was offshore then be offshore wishing I was on shore" and the same goes for pilots. I would rather spend more money for a system knowing I did not go cheap and cost me much more then the cost of the upgrade.
This article might help all to understand why 1333 RAM is not really 1333 ! ... and how you can save money, at the same time make your computer run FASTER ! http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&number=1&artpage=1962&articID=472
Could it be that "lockup" is more a factor of the software than the hardware? I've never had any kind of "lockup", and the computer upon which I execute trades cost me a whopping $254.
Now that's funny Gnome. Unless WinXP is the first OS you have ever used, you have had systems freeze/ fail. And you've never traded on some junk java system and had it freeze up? I agree most of the time something freezes it's software related. But software is limited by hardware. I guess we could all trade on those wind up free laptops (one laptop per child or whatever it is) but we're just too lazy for that and I don't know how many 30" monitors we could attain at build-out.
i upgraded from pentium 3 ghz to 3 ghz quad core and it was best thing i ever did, huge difference and for new machine on xp cost me about 800 bones