Trading Computer

Quote from Doobs789:

I want to know what components are recommended for a high-end trading computer. I would like to keep it around $3000, but could go higher. I realize that I can get a decent computer for far less money, but humor me. My primary concern is relative value- meaning I don't want to pay up for something that doesn't perform better.

I want a system that can drive at least six monitors. During the trading day I run the following: Livevol X, often IB TWS and/or thinkorswim, charting software, a very large excel workbook that pulls real-time data on several hundred stocks, multiple firefox tabs, email, chat, webinar stuff, and sometimes videos. I want the system to run extremely fast. With that being said, I have a few questions:

-Six core i7 processor or single/dual Xeon?
-Air or liquid cooling?
-Which motherboard, how many PCIe?
-What brand/model/number of video cards?

I recently put together a system that has the following: i7-3930k, ASUS Sabertooth x79, 32gb ram, dual Intel 520 240gb ssd, 2tb hdd, dual AMD 7850 cards.

Am I on the right track? What substitutions should I make? It may be overkill, but I want a really nice rig.

Thank you very much for your help.
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The i7 is more expensive but IMHO would last longer than the XEON. The XEONs tend to suffer from the prolonged heat
I would guess you run large calcs in your excel spreadsheets - that causes the system fan to start up on the T420s.

Good indication of the heat the cpus generate when all the cores are under load

who says you cant control the hardware with the software?
:)
 
Quote from mgabriel01:

The i7 is more expensive but IMHO would last longer than the XEON. The XEONs tend to suffer from the prolonged heat

:)
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I would have thought the opposite. Xeons are generally in workstations which tend to run many hours per day. ??
 
Quote from Scataphagos:

I would have thought the opposite. Xeons are generally in workstations which tend to run many hours per day. ??
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Toms Hardware site has some pretty good discussions on this
The thing can run all day - its more a matter of how much time the cores are working under load
 
Quote from mgabriel01:

The i7 is more expensive but IMHO would last longer than the XEON. The XEONs tend to suffer from the prolonged heat
I would guess you run large calcs in your excel spreadsheets - that causes the system fan to start up on the T420s.

Good indication of the heat the cpus generate when all the cores are under load

who says you cant control the hardware with the software?
:)
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Precisely. The excel sheet ties uses all four cores and really drives the temps up. I realize excel is not the best tool to use, but that's a different discussion. I use tpfancontrol to monitor/adjust temps.
 
Quote from mgabriel01:

The XEONs tend to suffer from the prolonged heat
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the above statement is completely incorrect... without going into the details as to why ... please keep in mind that Xeon is designed for the enterprise... in the enterprise level, the computers are on 24x7x365 and have to provide at the very least 99.9 uptime in the low end...
 
Quote from ofthomas:

the above statement is completely incorrect... without going into the details as to why ... please keep in mind that Xeon is designed for the enterprise... in the enterprise level, the computers are on 24x7x365 and have to provide at the very least 99.9 uptime in the low end...
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LOL
I stand corrected! I was doing 6 other things while answering the OP and I read XEON as AMD Phenom

I recant my earlier statement regarding heat
Thanks for keeping me honest!!
 
off the bat... separate your functions... last thing you want, is for your "normal stuff" to crash your "trading stuff".... also, you want something to be fast, but in what manner? fast is relative... your app(how you are doing calcs) sounds like it can multithread under excel...

without knowing what it really does I am inclined to say that you want to go dual processors and get as many threads as possible doing your calcs, that will finish "faster"... single thread performance might be lower... but the workload is what you are looking to speed up...

I think everything else has been covered by others already and in other threads as well...

but to re-iterate...

drop those 7850's... you dont need them... waste of funds...
instead of getting internal SATA drive for storage, get an external array to store all your market data...
instead of 2x240GB... get a 240GB and a 128GB for the OS and apps... if you were planning to mirror them, not sure why you would have done that... if you really want IOPS, get a PCIe SSD isntead..

you already have the T420s... why not use that instead for all the browsing stuff? better yet... get another laptop for the browsing stuff, something that can operate as backup to your trading as well... a T430s or W530 will more than do it... I drive 2x27" from my T420s without issues, you are familiar with how to make that work already...

lastly... as I said, performance is relative... you need to determine if you are after single or multi-thread performance... it appears to me multithread is your requirement... so having the fastest toy wont help you as much as you think.. but having the one with the most number of threads will certainly help you...

look at reman requipment from DELL and HP...

PS. I will add... if you are doing calcs on options, one thing you should look at is using CUDA/OpenGL with Excel... depending on the precision level you require... get a card and play with it... I can assure you that depending on what you are doing that will be faster than any processor based computing you can get from a Xeon or i7... many of the grids that I am building lately are all GPGPUs... but again, it is driven by your code being able to go parallel...
 
Quote from mgabriel01:

LOL
I stand corrected! I was doing 6 other things while answering the OP and I read XEON as AMD Phenom

I recant my earlier statement regarding heat
Thanks for keeping me honest!!
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dont sweat it... wasnt beating up on you... merely clarifying things to avoid misconceptions.. :)
 
Quote from ofthomas:

dont sweat it... wasnt beating up on you... merely clarifying things to avoid misconceptions.. :)
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no offence taken
I would never have noticed they guy was talking about an entirely different cpu unless you mentioned it
 
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