Just wondering if anyone is running Windows 7 on an Intel i7 chip for their main trading platform. Would be curious to know if they are finding improvement with the latest tech.
My last 2 boxes were based on Athlon 64 X2 (B) 4800+ 2.5 GHz (65W) chip. I built 2 new boxes based on i7-930 Windows 7 in April. Big difference. About 5 times faster. I developed some custom indicators that sent the old boxes to a crawl during the first few minutes when the market opens. With the new boxs, no problem.
I'm running 64-bit W7 with an i7-870 and by most measures it's a pretty fast machine. But the real question is: Fast compared to what? A three year old computer? A more recent computer with an i5 chip? An overclocked i7-950? Is there something specific that you're trying to compare this configuration to?
A reasonable question, granted. My CTA consist of several people and unfortunately a room full of computers. Since nothing we do is anything near HFT, and in most cases latency and momentary liquidity are not even a real concern as our positions are normally established over a longer time frame, so when we've wanted to upgrade our computers in the past, we've always just gone out and purchased a few HP or IMB desktops and added that to the office pool. Now I'm in the process of setting up a computer to run at my home office which is more research oriented and will need to crunch a lot of numbers through various formats and programs. I have several years of ideas and code that we would like to start running, and so I'm looking for a machine for less than 10K which will be optimal to run everything from NinjaTrader to Matlab to a simple council program, most stuff in some form of C code. At first I was looking at the Cray CX1 but I think its over kill, and a bit 'brand' over expensive. I then investigated the CUDA concepts, but I'm still not certain how they will work for number crunching through windows or rather if we want to bother recoding programs to run on another platform OS. I appears that the new i7 chipsets are so fast they they alone may be enough for our work, and so I'm now looking at that possibility. Anyhow, I'm an economist, not a computer guy, so I'm stabbing around in the dark with the trading community to see what other peoples preference sets are so that I'll know when I've meet my greatest marginal return Thanks all for the input. Red
Check out www.pugetsystems.com. I've been buying trading machines from them for almost ten years. They can build anything from a fast air-cooled trading desktop to a screaming liquid-cooled research computer. And their customer service is second to none. They build custom computers for traders, fanatical gamers, video editors, etc. and know how to build high-powered machines that are extremely reliable.
The "Deluge A2" from pugetsystems.com = $2,083 Same, with "X58 Configurator" from CyberpowerPC.com = $1,088.
I've bought computers from both companies. When I priced the "exact" same system from both, PugetSytems was about $600 higher. I found CyberpowerPC's customer service to be dismal, and PugetSytems' customer service to be excellent. I'm willing to pay the extra bucks for the service.