AGP is faster than PCI. PCI-E is faster than AGP. PCI-E is also general purpose, not just for graphics cards.
True. For example, I have an Nvidia graphics card in one PCI-Express (PCI-E) slot and a RAID card for my hard disks in the other. Both the graphics and the HDD card are pretty fast. AGP is rapidly becoming obsolete, although it is faster than the plain vanilla PCI type, which are actually pretty difficult to find these days. Be aware that if you stick 2 cards in your machine it will likely generate a lot of heat, which in turn means you will need plenty of cooling fans = a noisy machine. Note that some Nvidia cards can drive two monitors off the same card, so you may only need one. Or you can buy a 24-inch monitor and have more screen space (1900x1200) that might make up for a second monitor. Sus
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/10/04/one_gigabyte_motherboard/page7.html http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1952&page=4
dude... c'mon, you are going to trade with 2D app's. as long as your video card has 8MB,and support 1600x1200 at 16bit color it is okay! who cares if you have PCI, AGI, PCI-E, or any combination thereof. performance of your application is determined on your CPU & amount of system meory. not graphcis memory, nor graphics card bus. PCI is old technology AGP is out since 1997 PCI-E is relatively new, and everyone is moving towards the faster stanard.
I'm not advocating anything in particular, however I will say this. I have both Matrox G200 MMS PCI and Nvidia NVS 280 AGP in a machine. I run Linux and use my own charting software written in Java. I have run some benchmarks using this charting software. The Nivida card is much more than twice as fast as the G200 and the Nvidia X server uses much less than half the CPU that the Matrox server does. The G200 performance is a significant limitation on throughput *for a Java graphics application* while the Nvidia is not. So I don't really subscribe to the view that all 2D cards are equal or nearly equal. I do agree that there is no point in installing monster 3D gaming cards with fans and high power consumption for this sort of thing.
my point was that there could be a cheaper way to Quad monitors. There is an micro-ATX board out with SLI, for those who like small foot print. Two Dual DVI cards and you can have four monitors.
If your trading computer is also a gamer, then yours are viable considerations. However, if your rig is for trading alone [and general purpose computing], you're probably better off having workstation cards... no noisy, cheesy fans, no heat issues... and "performance" is absolutely not an issue. Dual SLI for trading is like smashing a fly with a howitzer.
But the set up is much less expensive than workstation cards. . And in case I want to play a game or so, I've got the performance ...
3) No matter which brand you choose, buy the cards that have actually been manufactured by Nvidia or ATI. Do not buy the cheaper Nvidia/ATI cards made by 3rd party manufacturers. The latter are simply substandard and cause a lot of compatibility problems. Actually, you can't buy a nVidea card perse. nVidea makes the chipset which channel partners mfg as nVidea cards. As for fas as these mfgs being less than excellent i leave to others to judge! But they are names like ASUS, BFG, PNY, GIGABYTE, EVGA, XFX, MSI, AOPEN, BIOSTAR, well that's just to name a few, phew!