My current desktop machine... Bought it from Dell in 2015 for about $1000, has quad core i7, 24GB ram, SSD... and a couple of cheap 28" Asus LCDs (~$120 ea)... Runs everything I throw at it like a champ. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if I am still using it 2 or 3 more years, or longer. Fairly certain that having a machine any faster/better than this would make exactly 0% difference in my trading results. Blowing almost 7 grand on a desktop machine for trading? And several thousand more for a ridiculous amount of (probably) unnecessary screens? Not my cup of tea. It's not a matter of not being able to afford it... It's a matter of not wanting to throw money away.
Historically $7K is not a huge amount of money for computing hardware, but for a trading setup in 2017 it is overkill. I remember when my rich university friend's dad bought him a 386 back in 1991 for $5000!! That would be what? At least $10K in todays money right? Although if that money had been invested in the S&P with dividends reinvest back in 1991 it would be worth approx $50,000 today!
Absolutley agree ! People think they need supercomputers for trading. They don't. They really don't. I bet the guy with the over-specced Dell probably wasn't even using 1% of its processing power or memory. There are very few occupations that require such high-spec machines, and 99% of them are not in the Financial sector, and the few that are will not be day traders .... I can guarantee you that. Modestly specced computers can do complex mathematical calculations all day long.
Running lots of charts can eat cpu cycles, especially around big news events when all markets go crazy. I dont trade off charts myself. But I do run algo back tests over millions of bars of back data. I could always do with a faster CPU. My setup struggled on dual core, i had to upgrade to a quad core several years ago. I can imagine people doing more advanced analysis than me needing even more cores and more memory.
How much actual proper performance testing have you done ? I very much doubt any, especially if your first answer to "Brendan Gregg" is "who ?". Plotting charts is something computers can do in their sleep and don't need stupidly overspecced machines. Same goes for backtesting ! Especially if your backtesting software isn't even written to take advantage of your overspecced machine. There is a lot of heresey rubbish floating around the trading community about needing highly specified machines. In the end, for the majority of traders, its nothing but willy-waving about who can afford the most over-specced machines and fit the most monitors on their desk !
I have dual processor zeon quad core Dell with 24 GB ram for sale $300 bucks, with 2 nvidia graphics cards to handle 8 monitors