trading is a business. i trade for living too and i love tech stuff. i use my own applications running on PC i build by myself. however..like in any business one our goals is to keep expenses low..that's is why i prefer better\greater profits over latest/best hardware\software. unless you really needed for crunching massive amounts of data(i don't, that's why i use dual core AMD's and each of my PC's was build for 100-200$). i use old NVS 285 from ebay and they work just fine for dual mon. setup. a bit hot,but fine) Scataphagos is 100% right i would also prefer stability over latest OS..XP imo more than enough..at least for next 1-3 years..no reason to jump on some untested OS, which maybe not even supported by some applications..
Like I said, "depends upon your apps". Most run BARELY using the CPU all day long.... and that is "some amount of CPU". One exception is tic charts... if you're running several of those, the CPU will be used more. Change those tick charts to 1-minute, and the CPU usage will probably drop back to nearly zero. Another exception is "custom indicators"... ones you put together which are not pre-programed into your software.... The ones available as "stock" choices, will run from RAM.. already programed to do so. Your custom ones will use the CPU much more as they are not pre-programed, of course. Anyone looking to buy new equipment should "know his CPU usage"... see Task Manager. If you use yours a lot, go for more horsepower. If your setup does not use CPU hardly at all (as is the case with many/most traders), no sense in spending a lot on a high power CPU. As an example... I run something similar to most of us... 4-monitors, RT data, charts, browser, trading platform... even a TV Tuner. My CPU runs 0-1% all day long unless the TV Tuner is running.. then the CPU runs 5-10%.... no tic charts nor custom indicators.