Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
I run a intel quad core, but even NT7 only uses 1 core, for realtime trading, for back testing it uses them all.
So
For my intra-day trading what is the better set up, a dual core or single core? as I also use SQL to save data too, probably a dual core but SQL its fairly light on usage.
My point is if NT7 in real time only uses one core, whats the best setup?
Backtesting is obvious to go for quad but real time? to cope with those tick bursts?
Tinkerz
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Still would use a Core i7, NinjaTrader isn't everything.
I've got a Core i7 920 overclocked to 4.0ghz on air, it's a very nice system and somewhat inexpensive. I use MultiCharts these days, which is multi-threaded on each chart, and even with about eight charts and 20 stocks in market scanner, plus capturing all bid/ask/last data, CPU is never above about 8%.
Do not consider a single core! If NT is running all out, the other core can still handle other misc items (OS, SQL, etc), and NT occasionally uses more than one core.
Dual vs Quad vs Hex is a lot tougher to answer.
What is your current workload? What about future workload? Do you care about future proofing, or will you just get a new CPU when you cross that bridge? Is budget an issue? Are you willing to overclock, or do you want a stock CPU? What about everything around the CPU (MB, Mem, GPU, etc)? Are you building the system, or buying a system?
Generally, there are some really good dual core CPUs that can be overclocked or run very well stock. If you have a limited setup, these are probably the best bet. The only issue is really the future proofing.
When you move up the food chain, you have to be careful because you can not just compare clock speeds. With hyperthreading and the turbo modes, it gets harder to benchmark CPUs. The hardware sites have lots of articles, but the benchmarks are not really trading oriented. There are some articles on best single threaded CPU performance, but I have not seen one recently.
I just get alot of tick bursts, NT7 in real time only uses 1 of the cores of my q6600 really frustrating, i have the setup i want but need better hard ware, i run NT7
I did that with NT 6.5. Ran multiple VM's to accelerate backtesting. But, with NT7, backtesting utilizes multiple core's as you pointed out. It's only that the DOM, charts, T&S etc all seem to share the same thread still in NT7, so if this is really causing you a problem then technically you would run two or more VM's to share the load. But this seems like the wrong solution. You might consider switching charting applications if this is really a major problem for you, and just keep NT for DOM or backtesting or whatever you see fit. It doesn't seem smart to go to great lengths to work around a core problem in NT7 such as all the VM's and such.
I am unfortunately going from memory here and at 61 that's no guarantee of accuracy.. but I seem to recall mention made of having a separate processor on the motherboard for control processing (i.e. parity checking and the like) so as to greatly facilitate the CPU's ability to handle the occasional extreme tick-flow of trading. That used to be available on certain Asus motherboards and from my recollection, that eliminated the problem with handling tick spurts, etc.
Now I am not a computer guy so someone here probably knows if present computer designs provide for off-loading parity checking and such so that the cpu or whatever is free to handle tick flow on its own. A fellow trader had built more than a dozen pc's over the last few years for himself and others and he insisted on that. Is it even a concern these days or?