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Quote from LeeD:

If you don't want to install anything yourself and decide to stick with Cyberpower - your original choice - certaily, the price is right - go for a pair of ATI Radeon HD 5450.

Each ATI Radeon HD 5450 card cost in the range $40-$60 and supports up to 3 monitors (so you can have the maximum of 6 monitors with 2 cards).

Typically, an HD 5450 comes with a VGA, DVI and HDMI (or sometimes DyspalyPort) connectors. Depending on what mnitors you have you may have to buy additoonal adapaters (like DVI to HDMI for $3 - $5) and/or cables.
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This is a possibility -- bumping it up front. Thanks.
 
Quote from jokepie:

Two is better, every Motherboard stot has limited bandwidth and therefor if you put two instead of One, you will get better performance.
1GB or 512MB ? really dosent matter. Its the GPU that matters - Graphics processor.
Since you plan to run 3 mons, I suggest two cards.
If you have Intel processor - buy NVDIA cards not ATI.
If your monitors have HDMI inputs ? there are cards that have HDMI connectors as well.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133276
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Bump. Thanks again.
 
Quote from radist:

Kindly advise if I should alter an item.
I don't think it would be too late.
Many thanks again.
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DITTO on NVidia over ATI
to simplify my system, I'm going for Eyefinity 6 to drive all six monitors from one video card, but I hate having to switch to an ATI driver

Saw someone mention cards with VGA & DVI output. Stay clear of using VGA, it's acceptable with the right monitor/card, but you're not building an "acceptable" system on the cheap. The DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort is much clearer, sharper, lower fatique. No contest.

No need for faster than 1600 memory. Get low latency.

For your 2D trading info, don't worry much about the speed of the graphic card (and, 8x PCI-E is overkill). If one card will be driving all three monitors, make sure it's 1G mem (not 512M).

I didn't read through all the posts, nor look at the specs of the various SSDs. But I did see Photography mentioned. I often work with images that are 700-800 mb uncompressed without any additional masks or layers. For a huge leg up, consider going for a PCI-E SSD for your system disk (like a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227578) . Many (most?) PCI-E SSDs are double width cards, so they'll block a second slot. Watch out for spacing on your MB if you'll be running:
PCI-E SSD
PCI-E Video Card one
PCI-E Video Card two
and more so if the video cards are double wide cards, and if double wide, watch that there's enough room in the case for the last card's air flow.

And don't be shy about putting your photoshop primary swap disk on a RAM disk.

If you're going to be editing video, my opinion is that a PCI-E SSD is essential. If you're working with RAW video, the size of the drive is really going to cost you. For still photos, a 120G PCI-E SSD is about right for system, programs, trading logs and an area for photos you're currently working on.

If you haven't gone firm on the monitors yet, check out:
http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/
and
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?
Having one monitor a Dell Ultrasharp is bonus for photo retouching. A friend has an ultra sharp in the middle and two other Dell's on the side. There are others considered similar in quality. Don't know about LED available in that quality yet. Check the forums. (I'm saving for the 30" 3011 Ultrasharp)
 
Sounds like a great system radist. I'm sure you'll be pleased with it. Something I'm curious about and reading through the pages, I don't think anyone has really talked about it is: playing high def videos from netflix online. Is there a need for high end graphics chips for this? Does it help at all? you can tell i am totally clueless by my question lol
I'm probably going to get something similar to you radist. I definitely do not need to play games or edit movies/pictures. What I want to do is have several charts (maybe up to 30) and several different accounts (3 or 4) open at one time. I also want to be able to play HD movies from netflix or youtube without any problem. (On the system I have now, the cpu is old, but I do have 4gb of ram) As soon as I try playing HD stuff, cpu maxes out and everything freezes.
My plan/question is: I am thinking of getting the new 2600 i7, 12 gb ram, and a 10k rpm hard drive. But I am not sure about graphics chips. I'm only going to have one monitor. Would it be helpful to get the top of the line graphics chips like a 2 gb nvidia geforce gt420 or 1.5 gb nvidia geforce gt440 as opposed to the stock radeon ATI 5450. Actually I'm not even sure the 10k hard drive would help. What do the friendly resident experts think?
 
Quote from BoyPlunger:


......
I don't think anyone has really talked about it is: playing high def videos from netflix online. Is there a need for high end graphics chips for this? Does it help at all?
.....
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I don't believe any high performance graphics cards/chips are required. The main advantage of having high performance graphics cards/chips is that it offloads the computing-intensive tasks - such as drawing 3-D polygons, adding shading, shadows, handling translucency, etc.. from the computer's CPU to the graphcis processor. Those tasks are needed mostly for gaming - computer 3-D animations.

When you play a movie, it's just 2-D bitmap images transferred at high speed. Because images are transmitted in compressed forms (e.g. MPEG-4) from the server to your PC, you do need a CPU that is fast enough to decode the streamed data (which is why older, slower computers may have a hard time playing movies in high-def). But any low end graphics cards should do. I watch Netflix movies all the time on my LCD monitors and I only use some low cost EVGA and PNY Technologies graphics cards.
 
Quote from BoyPlunger:

Sounds like a great system radist. I'm sure you'll be pleased with it. Something I'm curious about and reading through the pages, I don't think anyone has really talked about it is: playing high def videos from netflix online. Is there a need for high end graphics chips for this? Does it help at all? you can tell i am totally clueless by my question lol
I'm probably going to get something similar to you radist. I definitely do not need to play games or edit movies/pictures. What I want to do is have several charts (maybe up to 30) and several different accounts (3 or 4) open at one time. I also want to be able to play HD movies from netflix or youtube without any problem. (On the system I have now, the cpu is old, but I do have 4gb of ram) As soon as I try playing HD stuff, cpu maxes out and everything freezes.
My plan/question is: I am thinking of getting the new 2600 i7, 12 gb ram, and a 10k rpm hard drive. But I am not sure about graphics chips. I'm only going to have one monitor. Would it be helpful to get the top of the line graphics chips like a 2 gb nvidia geforce gt420 or 1.5 gb nvidia geforce gt440 as opposed to the stock radeon ATI 5450. Actually I'm not even sure the 10k hard drive would help. What do the friendly resident experts think?
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I am still indebted to you for the corn short call some time back. To that end, here goes:

There seems to be a concensus among financial industry technology folks that with charting being in only two dimensions, there is no need for high end 3-D graphics processing power and there can actually be some negatives associated with them because of power demand and heat generated. There are many super systems out there running basic (bland) 2-D graphics cards like the nVidia NVS series which are very cheap, dependable and scalable. Stack as many as you can fit in the box if you want that much expansion.

With respect to the speed of the HDD, I don't know what you're reading and writing to HDD but that's what's to be considered. Will you benefit from a faster read/ write time? If the system is just streaming data I don't see where you benefit. If the system receives data and does a lookup and a calculation, then you would benefit.

Hope this helps. Let us know when corn gets toppy again please :)
 
Quote from Canoe007:
A friend has an ultra sharp in the middle and two other Dell's on the side.
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Exactly what I wanted but the installation person said all three monitors should be the same.

I'm sure you'll love that 30" Ultrasharp and worth waiting for it.

Thanks.
 
Quote from BoyPlunger:
My plan/question is: I am thinking of getting the new 2600 i7, 12 gb ram, and a 10k rpm hard drive. But I am not sure about graphics chips. I'm only going to have one monitor. [/B]
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If you're only using one monitor, my understanding is that the graphics is already integrated into the Sandy Bridge i7 2600K -- so no card is needed at all.
 
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