For sure. I had a laptop that I had to take apart to blow out the air intake/fan with compressed air. Fixed it.
I recently bought dell precision 7760 with Xeon w-11955m laptop+ 8 gb ecc and 256 gb ssd. The cost is 3000. I will buy more memory and ssd from eBay to upgrade it to 64gb memory and 2GB ssd. Dell Memory and ssd are 2 times price than sold on eBay or Amazon
Whether CPU and GHz matters depends on your application. As is already mentioned, if you only trade manually and are viewing one chart, the reception of market data and display on your screen is probably not really affected by cores and GHz. However, if you have an automated trading system which takes the incoming pricing information and then does a whole bunch of analysis, calculations, database operations and what not, then the CPU type and GHz might play a very important role.
I buy cheap but powerful computers. I find a sweet spot. Currently HP (in the past Gateway, Acer, HP). These machines are barely expandable with power supplies that could not power a top-end graphics card. That said, I have three desktops and a laptop capable of running my software. At least two will have my latest software ready to run. I don't have any problems with any of the computers. I have battery UPS on each machine. I have a generator. I don't, and should, have a backup internet connection. If I were buying a machine today I would get the machine I just bought a few months ago. HP AMD Ryzen 5700g (8 core, 16 thread, 3.8GHz base, 4.6GHz boost, onboard graphics) 16 gigs DDR4 3200 memory 500 GB M.2 drive 1 TB hard drive 300 watt power supply $675 The first thing I do is a clean install of Window 10 Pro This is way overkill for trading, but I use it for development also. ONN 50" 4K Tv/monitor with Roku $260 (the price has gone way up on these). I can't imagine any reason for a Xeon or ecc memory. Your software, OS, and hard drive will crash many times before you have a memory error that makes any difference to your trading. A backup computer, backup power supply, and internet connection is a much better investment. Next, automatic failover to your backup machine. Solar panels and a Tesla Power Wall. All are better than Xeon/ecc. All just my opinion at the moment and everyone's requirements are different.
All that in 2021? This is what cloud VPS are designed for and do it multiples better. Your house is more likely to catch fire than a data warehouse with a proper fire suppression system and then a generator and UPS won't help at all. And Windows is a bad idea for anything production.
You're not wrong, but for various reasons, I have no interest in VPS, and I seem to always find incompatibilities in the development tools I use in Linux. Anyway, if you are happy with your VPS setup, great.
I am not worrying about computer crash. I am worrying if my code is designed to buy 100 shares, but someone error occurs, the 100 shares become 10000 shares. That is why I bought Xeon and ecc memory.
That really does not occur often unless you actually have faulty memory or there's a solar flare event. Anyway Xeon does not help with that in any way, you might as well just bought a Ryzen desktop CPU and combined it with ECC RAM.