Is it worth it to pony up $200 more for a Pentinum4 laptop instead of an AMD?
- Thread starter howardy2k
- Start date
Quote from MrDinky:
After 2ghz, memory becomes more important than CPU power.
Unless you do some severe numer crunching like backtesting a system with complicated algorithms even the slowest CPU is fast enough. Spend the money for memory so the hard disk isn't used so often and that's what speeds up the system. A slower processor is cooler and that increases reliability.
I would buy the processor and the chipset from the same manufacturer. And AFAIK that means bying Intel.
@swtrader:
The problems with your computer aren't necessarily caused by the AMD chip. It might also be a bad configuration.
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And don't run Netscape and the trading software on the same computer because Netscape has bad memory management and makes the computer unstable. I'm not using IE very often, but it also managed to kill Windows98.
I have to bite the bullet here too and replace my HP 4150 unit. It has been a reliable workhorse, but the time has come to upgrade. Make sure you look into getting the new mobile tech units which will give you extended battery life. Also, get the full warranty as service can be a nightmare otherwise.
I was wondering the same thing, though I'm in the market for a laptop. ET has a review of AMD here
http://www.elitetrader.com/ha/guide/index.cfm?s=12&t=60&p=2
The author states "Many traders have asked about the suitability of the AMD Athlon for a trading workstation. Having built several Athlon-based systems myself, I can tell you that the Athlon performs flawlessly. We haven't received any reports of performance or compatibility problems from other traders either, so I have no hesitations about recommending the Athlon as a solid foundation for a high-end trading workstation. Considering that the 1.4 GHz Athlon has comparable performance to the 1.7GHz and 2.0GHz Pentium 4s at approximately half the cost, the Athlon is certainly the price/performance leader of the group and a worthy competitor for Intel."
He doesn't address long-term reliability specifically, however, which is of course a critical consideration. There's an email link on the first page of the article so you can probably ask the author further questions (Please post any responses you might receive from him!).
download the latest free versions of NSCP (hey, remember that stock?), and use that. The memory mgmt functions have improved substantially, and they also allow something that only Opera Software did, namely having one instance but multiple windows opened to differing webpages. NSCP calls this their TAB function, try it out.
Also, report the errors and system configuration that causes these memory leaks and surface outages.