Thanks for the link. If you ever run into one that works offline please let us know. Those junk widget clocks in Win7 are not worth a shit.
You use one of these systems to use hand gestures to place orders... in the heat of the battle, the computer will sell for you while you mean buy, and will buy for you when you mean sell. Guaranteed! LOL
I know some of the people that actually own those desks and machines. I'm not saying that the guy who put together the video did the photoshops but at some point someone took a desk that wasn't theirs and put themselves into it. I'm not saying the setups are fake - it's just funny to see some random sitting at a desk that's not theirs. Check this out: http://officethieves.com/ That's this guy's site and here's his real setup: http://www.stefandidak.com/ He's had several different versions and there are a group of 5-6 guys that are all software engineers or programmers who have gone equally overboard on their home setups - and they all have sites listing the guys they know have stolen a bunch of their stuff. I saved the Youtube link so I'll take the time (someday) and go through the pics and point out which ones are fake. I think I only saw three that I knew right away were photoshoped.
Sorry I guess I never replied to this. When I started working with those guys they were working at a prop firm (a legit one, like the kind that pays you a draw plus benefits plus bonus) and it was pretty shoe-strings & duct tape in that office. They didn't have properly setup monitors or stands and they were running 32-bit XP with 2x 512mb video cards and only 4GB of RAM (not that it mattered). The machines (dual-cpu) were set in the BIOS to split the block of available memory in half and divide it equally to each processor. Since 32-bit XP can only address 3.2GB of RAM, and each video card had 512mb the system was limited to 2.2GB of RAM. That was then split in two so each CPU had only access to 1.1GB of RAM. The machines would crash on an hourly basis and it was really just a sad site. When they moved upstairs and went out on their own they were allowed to keep their hardware but the prop firm pulled the HDD. I put whatever random HDD's that I had in there and made a bunch of configuration changes. That setup pictured (http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u298/winstontj/Trading/Hardware/trading.jpg) is only three machines. The center machine is a random custom built machine (I didn't build it) with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU (3.0ghz dual-core) and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. It had maybe a single 250gb HDD - nothing special. That machine (the middle one) was for position management. It ran Windows 7 x64 and ran only risk and position management software from Goldman (Redi's risk stuff). When they stopped using Goldman it ran something similar - but Laser. No charts or quotes, just showed all the accounts on both screens and the individual account positions, P&L and overall numbers. The two side machines (with the 4x bigger 26" monitors) were HP xw8600 workstation machines with dual Xeon x5450 (3.0ghz quad core) cpus. So each machine had 8 cores, each machine had 16GB of DDR2 ECC RAM and each machine had 4x 160gb HDD in RAID5 (just because I had the drives not for any performance issues). The video cards were ATI Radeon something - a quad-DVI card but they were all dying or dead so they ended up running 2x NVIDIA GeForce 8600 dual-DVI cards. They are super cheap on eBay so I bought two extra to sit in the desk incase something dies one day. I bumped the RAM in the dual-CPU machines up from 4GB up to 16GB and went from 32-bit XP to 64-bit W7. The hard drives were just extras that I had - normal 80gb or 160gb or 250 or 320gb 7200rpm drives either in a RAID1 or a RAID5 depending on the drives & size. RAID5 (or RAID1+0 if the machine could) with 4x 80GB HDD vs. RAID1 with 2x 320gb. They also got a decent NAS with 2TB. It was a night & day difference before & after with the same hardware just a better implementation and configuration. If I were to run 6-8 monitors from one machine I'd see no issue running a similar Dell or HP (Dell T7400 or 5400 or HP xw8600) with dual-xeon 5400 series CPUs. I'd get something a little higher clock speed though - the X5482 is really nice - or if you want to spend some cash you could get a newer workstation with Xeon 5500 or 5600 series (quad with HT or hex with HT). You would have no trouble at all running two quad-video cards (like an NVS 420 which is <$100 on eBay) or you could run 3x dual cards but you'll be hard pressed to find space to fit 4x dual cards in most machines. I'd stay away from that option personally. Best to go with 2x quad-cards than 4x dual. Each of those machines with 16gb (8x 2gb sticks of ddr2) never even came close to maxing out even 50% of the memory. It was a bit overkill but 2GB sticks of RAM are cheap on eBay. Hope that answers your questions.
Okay. I will not be surprised that some of the pictures (the posts) were duped. This thread contains probably over 100 desk setup pictures. The video featured maybe 30 40 50 of them I didn't count. Your statement said half of these pictures were photoshoped. 50%. I think that's an over exaggeration. To me, photo-editing is harder than IT work! And your statement implied that more than half of the posters here are crooks! Bragging to total strangers??? What for? Anyway... I just know mine are real.
Anyone got a mobile trading station without all the messy mouse, wires, hardware stuff like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1magCv4LtM
I found the information gleaned from following the links (own and to others) at stefandidak.com very interesting, - these are guys who also spend all day in front of multiple screens. Also maybe some answers for those questions about managing monitors and windows from one keyboard........(mac not Win?) http://www.stefandidak.com/windows-layout-manager/ http://www.inputdirector.com/ Says he has replaced synergy with these.