Thanks for your replies. The spec of the PC I am thinking about going for is below,feedback appreciated Intel xeon w3670,six core,3.2ghz,12mb,4.8gt Windows 7 Ultimate 12GB (6x2) 1333mhz DDR3 ECC UDIMM 1TB(7200 RPM) SATA 3.0GB 32MB 16X DVD Drive + 16X rewriter 512MB Nvidia NVS420 Graphics Card
Robbo... PM say's "can send only 1 PM per 10 minutes"... that sucks... So here's what I intended as an addendum.... "Forgot to say... he got it for about $1400... would have been $3100 if ordered from the retail site."
Wow thats a great deal. I will check out the Outlet site. I was going to phone dell and try and negotiate a good deal like I did last time but I will check out the outlet site first.
I like the set up but I would go with a faster but smaller hard drive or solid state drive. I like the: Western Digital VelociRaptor WD4500HLHX 450GB 10000 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Not sure if Dell sells it. Requires newer motherboard with SATA 6.0Gb/s.
That was not a "common" deal... it was one of the spectacular ones. Sometimes I get the idea that Dell doesn't know what the proper price is and offers it too low. If you know what the price should be and are patient, you can sometimes pick up one of these steals.
HI Rmorse,what benefits would I get going for the hard drive you advised to buy over the hard drive I selected.
HI Scataphagos, I knew that was a good deal, definitely pays to be patient. I will log onto the outlet store on a daily bases so I have got a good chance of getting a brilliant deal.
For most traders, unless your using VERY large spread sheets or programs that use a lot of audio or video resources, high clock speeds and very large blocks of ram make very little difference. Even a quad core running WIN XP with 4GB of ram with a clean hard drive will run very well. I was an options market maker with this set up making markets in 15 options this way. Every strike, every month very math intensive and never used more than my ram or 60% of my CPU. With that said, with a WIN 7 machine I would get at least 8GB of ram. High clock speeds as long as you stay in the I7 family will not be noticeable. Your trading machine will be slowed down by a 7500 RPM drive. The hard drive is in constant use. It's used for virtual ram, reading and writing data. A 10K RPM drive with the new sata connection will do more to speed up you machine's performance than over clocking. Unfortunately, Dell charges a large premium when you add products like this. I've been building my own computers for years by buying my parts from Newegg.com. Do you have any friends to help you try that? The machine will be less expensive, have only the parts you pay for and more importantly, have a clean install of win 7 with no other crap added.
Original post said 4 monitors. Specs that OP asked for advice on show one video card. Is that a two head or four head card? I agree; seems like a screaming build which should serve well for a long time.