No, not necessary. Trading apps are generally not heavy IO functions. A faster hard drive will mostly just boot up 25%-ish quicker. SSDs are nice (I use them in all my rigs), though pricey.... faster, silent.... but not really necessary, either. If you decide to go with SSD, suggest Intel X25-M... many reports show them to be the most reliable.
ibuypower.com has similar prices to cyberpowerPC.com You might be able to get one with free shipping and avoid the CA sales tax.
Once I nail the configuration down, I'll compare with ibuypower. The only neg so far with cyberpower is the wait until after the holiday for the system. A plus is I can drive the system back if I ever have any problems. Thanks for the second vendor.
No... it's really very easy... and nothing you can mess up. You can probably Google "how to replace a video card" and see a little video to instill confidence. Computers nowdays are quite fault tolerant and electrically grounded. Still, it's a good idea to touch the back of the computer to discharge any static electricity you have in your body before opening the case. (I'm inside computer cases often and have never killed anything because of static discharge... however, I do wear a wrist strap when addressing the CPU... other than that, I just touch the back of the case before messing with the components and don't worry about it.)
What's the wrist strap made of? What do you think about the hard drive. 16MB Cache 7200RPM or 32MB 10000 RPM?
If you don't want to install anything yourself and decide to stick with Cyberpower - your original choice - certaily, the price is right - go for a pair of ATI Radeon HD 5450. Each ATI Radeon HD 5450 card cost in the range $40-$60 and supports up to 3 monitors (so you can have the maximum of 6 monitors with 2 cards). Typically, an HD 5450 comes with a VGA, DVI and HDMI (or sometimes DyspalyPort) connectors. Depending on what mnitors you have you may have to buy additoonal adapaters (like DVI to HDMI for $3 - $5) and/or cables.