Recommendations for OverClocked PC custom builder?

Quote from opt789:

Let me make this quite simple. Do NOT get an overclocked pc for anything to do with trading. Any builder, who tells the truth, will tell you that overclocking any part of a PC can lead to stability issues at some point.
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Why spread such blatantly false information? There's nothing to prevent an OC'd system from being 100% stable; this is why you run stress tests (prime95, memtest, etc.) for 24hrs+. Any competent builder can confirm this. I find it funny that there's such a stigma against overclocking pc components among the uninformed masses.

As long as you're not pumping massive vcore to your CPU and have adequate cooling, overclocking is a great, safe way to milk as much performance as possible out of your components. Most processors these days will easily overclock 10%+ on stock voltage, assuming the RAM can handle the increased FSB.

Go here for credible information:
OCForums

P.S. - I'm currently running at 3.0GHz on a 1.8GHz dual-core AMD, 100% stable for the last 2 years.
 
Quote from toolifog:

Why spread such blatantly false information? There's nothing to prevent an OC'd system from being 100% stable; this is why you run stress tests (prime95, memtest, etc.) for 24hrs+. Any competent builder can confirm this. I find it funny that there's such a stigma against overclocking pc components among the uninformed masses.

As long as you're not pumping massive vcore to your CPU and have adequate cooling, overclocking is a great, safe way to milk as much performance as possible out of your components. Most processors these days will easily overclock 10%+ on stock voltage, assuming the RAM can handle the increased FSB.

Go here for credible information:
OCForums

P.S. - I'm currently running at 3.0GHz on a 1.8GHz dual-core AMD, 100% stable for the last 2 years.
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Well it’s nice that your old machine is still working, must be nice to have to not have to worry about spending money you don’t have. When your trading profits equal half my wife’s credit card bill let me know. You can get a whole 10% with overclocking, wow that’s great.

As apposed to the couple post piker, I have recently purchased overclocked machines from a couple different manufactures with price tages over $6k. I have spoken at length with many respected builders, but you can just ignore me and take random advice wherever you like. When you try to overclock a chip to a degree that you will actually notice you are obviously increasing the heat. More heat means less life and more potential problems, and more work and cost in additional cooling requirements. Overclocking does not mean (and I never said) that you WILL have problems. It simply means that over time your probabilities, something a trader would understand, increase to an unacceptable risk/reward ratio when one single outage in the middle of a trade can cost you dearly. Regular computer users, gamers, etc. can get by with an overclocked machine, but anyone who actually trades with a large amount of money knows that constant stability in your trading machine is very valuable.

Overclocking is fine for a rig where stability is not paramount, and is best for people who know enough to build the machine themselves. From the original post, neither of these apply.
 
Nothing stopping someone from having 1 pc overclocked for running models/backtesting, and another "more stable" pc for trading.
 
I use an overcloced e850 running at 3.8ghz. Its more that my motherboard, ram, hdd, graphics card etc. are all optimized for each other which impacts the perfomance though. It runs well within the temp ranges, you just need a case with good circulation and a quality heat sinc. Thing is lightning fast. You want to concentrate on the motherboard, choosing a chip is easy, picking a motherboard is not.

If you do it yourself you can set yourself up for under 1800 with dual 22" monitors and top of the line components. If you pay a shop for the same thing they will charge double and skimp on alot of the parts.

P.S. You are going to want to overclock your ram and motherboard as well so don't skimp out.

P.P.S. Much of stock software is not built for threading, if your software only runs on one core and can max it out, then you want to concentrate on getting one really fast core, which is better accomplished on a single or dual then a quad.
 
Try this...
Go to newegg.com put "I7" in the search... some nice gaming systems will appear. from 997.00 to 3k+. The 1089.00 box is a real screamer. Comes with 6gigs DDR3 ram Nice video card and the I7 920 CPU, with 64 bit vista premium included. It's hard to beat the power for the price and you can have it in 2 days.
Good luck.
 
Thanks for all the replies, guys. A lot of options to chew on.

To answer some of the queries, I need speed because continuous backtesting is necessary to calibrate my trading system weekly. The system works well (i.e. it's actually stable and profitable).

And if I had enough computing power to optimize daily, then my system would do even better.

Eventhough AmiBroker is a 32-bit app, my understanding is that I can run multiple instances of it on 64-Bit Vista, each on a separate core. And furthermore, 64-bit Vista would allocate up to 3GB RAM for each instance. So in that way, I could dramatically speed up my optimizations, by having several instances going at the same time. And if I further overclocked the i7, that would yield even more speed.

Are the above assumptions correct?

The NVIDIA CUDA personal supercomputer is certainly a wet dream. But AB is not a multithreaded software. And my understanding is that one would have to build a multi threaded kernal from scratch, which is well beyond my capacity. So no CUDA for now. :(
 
Quote from ozzymandius:

Thanks for all the replies, guys. A lot of options to chew on.

To answer some of the queries, I need speed because continuous backtesting is necessary to calibrate my trading system weekly. The system works well (i.e. it's actually stable and profitable).

And if I had enough computing power to optimize daily, then my system would do even better.

Eventhough AmiBroker is a 32-bit app, my understanding is that I can run multiple instances of it on 64-Bit Vista, each on a separate core. And furthermore, 64-bit Vista would allocate up to 3GB RAM for each instance. So in that way, I could dramatically speed up my optimizations, by having several instances going at the same time. And if I further overclocked the i7, that would yield even more speed.

Are the above assumptions correct?

The NVIDIA CUDA personal supercomputer is certainly a wet dream. But AB is not a multithreaded software. And my understanding is that one would have to build a multi threaded kernal from scratch, which is well beyond my capacity. So no CUDA for now. :(
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So the Quad Xeon with 8 to 16 processors & 2 to 4 GB Ram per processor wasn't an option? Cool.
 
Let me add something out of left field. Get superspeed ramdisk (the fastest of them) and create a xG ramdisk to run your program.

Put your backtesting programs onto the ramdisk. Also point your temp directories at the ramdisk. That way all of the activities associated with backtesting will be at ram speeds.

Of course this is only of much value if there is some disk access associated with your backtesting.
 
Quote from ProfLogic:

So the Quad Xeon with 8 to 16 processors & 2 to 4 GB Ram per processor wasn't an option? Cool.
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I am considering it. But what makes me nervous is that I have zero experience running enterprise server software. I've only run the various iterations of Windows (2000, 98, XP).

What kind of learning curve would be involved with 2003 server? And is it still fully supported?
 
Quote from ozzymandius:

I am considering it. But what makes me nervous is that I have zero experience running enterprise server software. I've only run the various iterations of Windows (2000, 98, XP).

What kind of learning curve would be involved with 2003 server? And is it still fully supported?
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and when you say that Windows Server 2003 enterprise edition runs all the processors to their full potential, do you mean that all the processors and all the RAM can be applied to a single instance of a 32-bit app? Or do you mean that I can run one app on each processor and divide the ram up accordingly?
 
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