I am no expert, but it looks like my CPU is not maxing out at 100%, and that there is a lot of disc I/O going on. However, take into consideration that in order to merely *run* Blocks on my machine, I had to slim Blocks down quite a bit, disable a lot of features I would like to use, and lessen the amount of data being calculated substantially from what I would ideally want to. In other words, my system used to just hang when running Blocks until I "optimized" it for my slow, old system. Not sure how this relates to the question at hand. Perhaps throwing money at the CPUs is not the answer? Perhaps the machine would be happy running on a single quad-core, or dual dual-cores, or even a single dual-core, and the real bottleneck is memory speed? Or memory capacity? Or hard drive speed? Or something else? I need to talk to the developers. What do you make of this Tums? How do you read it?
I did not realize you were running a slimmed down version. As is, your computer is running fine... like you have observed, the CPU is not maxed out yet... there are still memory for swing room... But of course you want to throw everything at the Blocks and make it sing. Since the program is multi-threaded, and you want to do many analysis at the same time... it would make sense to get a Quad core over a Dual core. With multi-thread programs, a slow Quad wins over a fast Dual. p.s. I don't think a Xeon grade CPU is price/performance effective in your case.
here's where everybody checks for CPU benchmarks http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-q3-2008/3DMark-Vantage-CPU,817.html The chart I have chosen is 3DMark Vantage - CPU. This is a CPU intensive test. I thought it would better represent your software's requirement. You can choose other benchmark to see the different performance behavior. I am using Q6600. It is the most cost effective CPU on the market right now. I am throwing a lot of charts and analysis on it, and it seldom rise above 30%.
I would certainly address the disk I/O issues. A great place to get advice on rigs for trading is on audio forums that focus on building digital audio workstations. Audioforums.com is a great site. If your doing digital audio you have alot of the same issues as we do as far as massive disk I/O if your trading software is storing things to your disk. A 10k rpm drive and frequent defrag might help out a ton here. Also look at optimzations for digital audio, tons of little tweaks that will help out to get your system going better.
Tums, instead of a Xeon, somewhere around a Q9550 about right then? Q9650 worth the extra few hundred? The Q6660 is an attractive choice as well. I will consider how important the slower FSB over the Q9550 is (1066 vs 1333). jdeezero, always nice to chat with a fellow producer My current system is actually a DAW I built 5 or 6 years back with the help of folks over at the DigiDesign forums. As for the I/O, I was thinking about a SAS SCSI drive, I hear Seagate has some nice offerings, have yet to do the research.
I doubt you will see a noticeable difference in the performance of your Blocks... but you will feel it. one of the CPU will make you happier... buy what you can afford. ;-)
Still waiting on a response from Worden. Did some research on that Q6660, so far I like everything I see. Having some trouble finding a motherboard for the Q6660 with some tweaking options that also comes with onboard SATAII or SAS SATA so I can hook up a SSD or SAS SCSI drive. Any recommendations?
I would add that your 1 gig of ram is a serious bottleneck. Bringing it up to 2 gig would allow it to show a noticeable difference. You never ever want to have the hard drive being accessed (ok ok, you want to MINIMIZE it) due to the fact that the HDD is the slowest part of the data process. Before blocks gets running you have a large amount of ram being used by XP and blocks will as I understand it use a LOT of ram. I have an idea on sharing the 'mother of all blocks computers' via remote desktop or something like that. let me know if your interested