Trying to decide which is a better deal. http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=XW8600-XEON333-NOOS-R&cat=SVR http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=XW8600-XEON333-MAR-7R&cat=SVR Thanks. J.Thomas
Also agree. These are great machines in general and the quad core CPUs are getting cheap on ebay. If you ever choose to upgrade get the Xeon x5482 not a x5460, the 5482 is a much better/faster CPU.
Should be able to run many. Assuming the BIOS cooperates, you could run a quad-port card in all 5 of the pcie slots... that's 20 monitors. Would that be enough?
Check this out: http://social.technet.microsoft.com...e/thread/f4f7cbd8-2369-43d7-9a7e-a655543c0267 You have a "soft" limit of 10 monitors in W7 but you can go up as many as you want if you read the link above. I think the question you are asking is how many monitors can you run while not giving up machine performance. I'd say you can run 2-3 monitors easily, a quad setup without problems but you may get bogged down. If you go more than four monitors you would probably want the 5400 series CPUs as you'd take a performance hit. That's just an opinion based on experience. That base machine would support 50 monitors as long as you don't run any applications. In my experience when you have more monitors you try to run more stuff. That's where you'll get the performance hit. For reference, you can get an x5450 on ebay for ~$40 and you can get an x5482 for less than $100. You have one dual-core in that thing. Before you waste any $$ getting a second CPU just get a x5450 and see how that is. For $40 it'll be a great upgrade. Just get the SLANP step code as they were the most common of the x5450 CPUs.
It depends upon applications. Years ago, I ran 4 monitors from a P4 without any slowdowns and low CPU usage. If he's running "commercially available, standard software" (like MetaStock), it's likely he can run 8 monitors in a trading setup without a noticeable performance hit. However, if he is running custom software, custom indicators, or more than a couple of tic charts, he will want more horsepower. Most stock software is designed to run from RAM... but when you get into custom things, the CPU likely has to do the work.. and too much of that can slow things down. How can one tell? Check CPU usage in the Task Manager when running the full load of trading and multi-tasking apps. If CPU usage is low, then no worry about slowdown. If CPU usage is high AND running tic charts, change tic charts to something longer... 1 minute, 5 minutes, and check CPU usage again.... should have dropped way down. Only way to know for sure is to try it out.