PC's vs Workstations

The one guy who I speak to frequently who says he really needs the dual pentium, dual hard drive config. uses a large database to do statistical analysis...For him I guess this is so labor intensive that it would bog down the entire machine while doing this data mining...

My impression is that any of the software that we(as in most of us on this forum) are using would run sufficiently well on a PC that is juiced up with enough quality RAM and processing speed...

Out of curiosity...any of you guys who are using OptionVue, how labor intensive is this software on your systems?
 
I built a computer which uses: AMD 1800xp, 1 gig of ram, Matrox G200 quad card, Matrox G550, and W2k Pro with 4 lcds. During the trading day I have open: Qcharts, 2 IB windows, a couple of IE windows, and sometimes Outlook Express. My system is PLENTY beefy for all this, as the cpu runs 10-20% and ram is never over 500mb unless I open a huge text file.

Instead of building a top-of-the-line system, I decided to spend my money on a nearly identical backup computer. Both have dual hard drives which I backup with System Guardian.
 
I'd like to build a serious multimonitor workstation for trading and system development with the appropriate backups to brokers, the internet, hard drives, etc. to avoid some of the nightmares I read about here at ET. It would be very helpful if the Workstation Guide was updated to include examples of hardware configurations for the beginning trader to the highly capitalized veteran pro. Also, it would be nice to include more coverage of vendors' systems and products.
 
I have more of a computer hardware background then financial markets so I hope this is of help.

One's hardware requirment is really contingent on what sorts of applications are utilized as well as to what level, which I believe everyone has a decent understanding of what their requirment is. For instance, someone who is has a long term discretionary trading style will be fine with a 400mhz computer running a 15" monitor. On the other hand, we have quite a few traders (here possibly) that day trade and have multiple monitors and are running mulitple applications in conjunction, and it all varies with each person. So one really has to determine for oneself how much hardware power is needed.

For instance, I have a 250mhz Cyrix based system that runs XP that I use for general use, and I just acquired a dual AMD Athlon 1600+ MP with Tyan motherboard system to run some analysis since I like the confort of having instant feedback from the computer even with high intensive applications. The payoff is well worth it since I'm on the computer so much, the responsiveness of the computer is a huge pay off for the increase cost in hardware.

If you've got money to burn, go with SCSI. If not, I'd recommend a Western Digital Second Edition (SE) hard drives. They have one of the best benchmarks and are what I run in my IDE setup. Don't be fooled into believe ATA133 is "faster" than ATA100. That's like saying a Intel chip running at 1.5ghz is faster than a AMD running at 1.4ghz :)

On the topic of monitors, the reason why I believe people see a boost in either resolution or computer performance from an increase in memory is because many times if the computer doesn't believe that the video card has enough onboard memory, it will actually utilize some of the system memory in order to compensate. So you're essentially "extending" the video card onboard memory, so to speak.

Hope this is of little help.


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All of the above information could be and probably is misinformation. Please act accordingly.
 
Originally posted by vulture
I wanted to start a thread (even though it has been discussed many times in previous threads) about specifically what type of performance enhancement people have seen using workstations as opposed to high end pc's...

For instance, how many traders on this site are using Dual Processor, Dual SCSI drive workstations and in what circumstances should a trader decide that it is worthwhile to invest in Dual SCSI drives as opposed to a standard hard drive...What RAID configuration is best? Which RAID controller, etc, etc...

I am still something of a novice in this area but trying to get a better feel cause I think it is pretty important...

nitro?...I know this is right up your alley
More...

Actually there's not much advantage for a single user to benefit from in using RAID or SCSI with today's ATA performance you can get from any desktop or workstations. RAID allows servers to have redundancy such as mirroring, duplexing, etc...
Level 0: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disks) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance.
Level 1: Provides disk mirroring.
Level 3: Same as Level 0, but also reserves one dedicated disk for error correction data. It provides good performance and some level of fault tolerance.
Level 5: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance.
But none of this really improves performance for a trader on a single PC, you'll just waste resources and make your room extremely hot (because they require more power and thus the back of the server will dump out more heat). SCSI used to be good because they provide more data throughput but with ATA being so high now it's essentially not necessary. In general however, you should buy a workstation because it's geared toward business functions rather than desktop for family and kids. If you go with Dell, go with a Precision rather than a Dimension. Hope that helps!
 
Thanks for the response...

I actually use a few pc's on a LAN instead of one workstation...At the time I posed that question I was considering going with a custom made Dual Xeon, but decided that my hardware needs did not require it...I focus on a handful of markets and do not run a large database or anything that would require the SCSI RAID set-up...
 
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