Are gaming laptops worth it?
- Thread starter Johnni.h
- Start date
The horsepower of a gaming laptop is not necessary for trading.
My rec is to buy a Dell Precision 7510/7710, used, on eBay for ~$600-$700... or equivalent. You can find some with warranty or purchase same from Square Trade.
Machines of this class are $2,500+ new...
My rec is to buy a Dell Precision 7510/7710, used, on eBay for ~$600-$700... or equivalent. You can find some with warranty or purchase same from Square Trade.
Machines of this class are $2,500+ new...
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Benefit of gaming laptop is graphics card. Pay big money for powerful graphics cards in a laptop.
For trading or backtesting your big thing is cpu and ram. Built in graphics is plenty sufficient. Better to direct funds towards quality, battery, cpu, screen, keyboard etc instead of dedicated graphics.
All gaming laptops have horrible battery life due to the graphics card and their all quite large. My sager gaming laptop weighs probably 8 lbs and the charging brick is the size of a brick and weights 2-3 lbs itself.
Unless your a content creator, it’s unnecessary. I’d be looking at dell xps, Lenovo thinkpad, or surface 3. I’d pay attention to how modular they are for components. As far as budget laptop I’ve had good luck with Asus line ups.
For trading or backtesting your big thing is cpu and ram. Built in graphics is plenty sufficient. Better to direct funds towards quality, battery, cpu, screen, keyboard etc instead of dedicated graphics.
All gaming laptops have horrible battery life due to the graphics card and their all quite large. My sager gaming laptop weighs probably 8 lbs and the charging brick is the size of a brick and weights 2-3 lbs itself.
Unless your a content creator, it’s unnecessary. I’d be looking at dell xps, Lenovo thinkpad, or surface 3. I’d pay attention to how modular they are for components. As far as budget laptop I’ve had good luck with Asus line ups.
Thank you! Are there any minimum requirements you would look for as far as RAM, GB, etc...
Any laptop these days to run W10 will have at least 8GB RAM... which is likely enough... but you might want to spring for 16GB, just in case. (My trading rig when running all the programs I might run at one time ... uses <4GB RAM, so 8GB on this machine is adequate. Check your Task Manager for RAM usage when fully loaded to see if you need >8GB.)
Any video card these days will have 2GB VRAM, minimum, which is plenty. As for the CPU, you can pay up for whatever speed you want or can afford... but it won't make much difference in a trading environment because the CPU is used sparingly unless you have custom applications.
8 gigs is a minimum. My two laptops both only have 8. Never had a hiccup. 16gb be my ideal setup. You start doing heavy backtesting it can benefit or if you run a lot of tasks. SSD is a must. Depending on your uses will vary. My little Asus laptop I use on couch has 256gb and I’m fine. I just run office, vscode, Amibroker, plenty of room. Most junk like pictures and backups all on other laptops tb harddrive or OneDrive. Cpu for trading platform not that important. Backtesting will benefit from more cores/clock speed depending on how their doing it.
If you consider trading to be a game then you might be interested in a gaming laptop. Otherwise, if you consider it a serious activity, you don't need a gaming laptop (or gaming desktop). In gaming the emphasis is often on the graphics card and its performance. It needs to be very powerful and having a very fast response time, plus little time lag. However, displaying candlestick charts and tables on a monitor does not require a very powerful graphics card.
What you do need depends on what kind of trader you are. If you look at charts and tables and then manually place orders I would say that almost any computer is fine. If, on the other hand, you run a lot of backtesting software and do automated trading, then you might be better off if you buy a computer with sufficient computational power (CPU) and sufficient memory (RAM size).
What you do need depends on what kind of trader you are. If you look at charts and tables and then manually place orders I would say that almost any computer is fine. If, on the other hand, you run a lot of backtesting software and do automated trading, then you might be better off if you buy a computer with sufficient computational power (CPU) and sufficient memory (RAM size).
