Quote from cooltraderabhi:
Hello everyone,
Whats a good place to buy a good, really fast trading laptops or desktops?
I found Custom Trading Computers. Any other inputs?
What do you really want? Trading is a low power thing, except backtesting and then no laptop and no normal desktop comes close to what you need (Which is a multi processor server or better a whole bunch of them).
This is like asaying "I need a super powerfull and fast city car". Bad news - city cars are neither super powerfull now fast nor expensive. Those are racing cars. Want to have a super powerfull laptop these days? Look for an alienware gaming desktop. GAMING (!) is where the power is needed.
Any decent low to mid range computer is capable of trading, and any decent graphcis card these days can drive 6 or more screens with one or more of thoese cards (and having multiple cards is a decent gamer trick - there are motherboards build for 5 - 6 cards these days).
COmpanies that sell custom trading computers mostly rip you off.
If you want to go top end, go for a LGA 2011 based mobo with a nice I7 3870 chip (not worth going to the next higher up) and the mobo will allow fast overclocking - one button clock and all cores run at 4ghz permanent. THe motherboards that are good for this though are - well

Made for gamers. I got myselv f a nice one, and it is from Asus - and their line is called "Republic of Gamers" (use it to run backtests, play with window sserver 2012 etc.).
But again - trading is like "get a low power thing with lots of battery time" (in case of a laptop"). Even automated trading is not really high power computer unless you go HFT (and then this is a totally different specialized hardware setup to fight for microseconds) and other elements are a lot more important (like colocating).