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I am looking to purchase a new system that supports multiple monitors and am looking to buy it rather than build it on my own. I ran into 2 names:
Tradingcomputers
Customtradingcomputers
I am looking to see if anyone has bought systems from them and also any other names that I can buy from.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Today, large monitors have become cheap. So I would opt for large high resolution monitors (that is 24'' or 30'' inch with 2560 x 1600 pixels). Connect these to a professional 2D graphics adapter such as nVidia NVS 295.
If you fit your Dell or HP machine with two NVS 295 adapters, you can connect 4 monitors. If you really need more than four, you can select NVS 450 + NVS 295 for 6 monitors etc.
Some years ago, Microsoft conducted a study on productivity and found that the highest performance was achieved with 6 monitors. I would not mind having three vertical mounted monitors. It is really a question of taste.
I purchased from Trading Computers a year ago iand I am very happy. I dont really like to fiddle with computers so whenever i need help they get into your computer and do it all for you. Beside the great computer they make the customer support is awsome.
I purchased a fast and rather expensive system from TradingComputers.com a little under 4 years ago.
Initial build quality was a problem from the start (i.e. of the 3 fans in the system.. one fan blade appeared to be totally missing and was finally found when I removed the right side panel later on for another reason; another had failed to operate since inception (though I had not noticed that until much later) and it turned out there were bent fins on the cpu cooler that were wedged against the fan blade (apparently the tech who assembled the system accidentally bent the fins but did not bother to straighten them or see if they created any problem). The third fan, the big 250mm side fan..fortunately operated fine and saved the system from totally overheating. To their credit, they promptly sent out a private tech totally at their expense who replaced the cpu cooler and thus got that smaller fan running as well.
Next I experienced what they said were probably just problems with my primary hard drive (I have a primary, a swappable secondary and finally a separate storage drive that holds the disk image back-ups). A lengthy testing process ensued with them walking me through all of it step by grueling step for hours over the phone. Over several days of effort, I eventually ended up replacing drive cabling, replacing the swappable drive racks and eventually even two of the original 3 hard drives. Up to that point, all of the cost was fully covered under the 3 year warranty and thus only cost me the considerable time and effort of digging directly into the system myself at their direction. Now, other than phone support, all costs are mine.
After all that failed to solve the problems it was determined it was actually a bad hard drive controller chip or ports (something I had suggested early on but which was pooh-poohed as highly unlikely.) Fortunately the motherboard had a secondary controller chip and another set of ports and that resolved the issue.
Now my original secondary hard drive apparently has developed bad sectors which stop me from making my Acronis disk image back-ups so here we go again.
Unfortunately, it has been a continual procession of problems almost since purchase. The techs at the vendor are pretty decent based upon my limited experience with techs. To be fair, I learned a good deal about the guts of my computer system in the bargain, but I honestly did not pay that kind of money for a system just to become my own hardware inspector and maintenance man.
I note that at least one other trader here at futures.io (formerly BMT) has mentioned purchasing from the same vendor with no apparent problems to date, so other people's mileage can clearly vary, as the saying goes. In the end analysis I think going forward I will make friends with a local very savvy tech guy and have him help me put together a system next time that he can service locally if necessary or else I will follow the advice of Fat Tails and simply acquire a pretty much standard off the shelf pc with a fast cpu, sufficient memory and good 2D cards and again have it repaired locally if it is something I myself cannot easily do.
I hope I did not bore the readers here with too many details.
Thxs for all the replies. One question I have is with respect to CPU for trading - I am not sure on the below:
1) No of cores
2) Clock speed
I understand the higher the number the faster the speed but also think that that the beyond a certain point the charting software cannot take advantage of the hardware and so is an overkill. So how do you go about choosing this because for example if a 3.3Ghz clock is more than fast enough there is no need to buy a 3.8Ghz just because it is faster and all the marketing - So any help on this would be appreciated.
I have a very basic system. But it's good enough for me. My system is a 2.8GHz AMD Athlon X4 630 with 4GB memory. I run 6 instances of Sierra Chart, OEC platform and IB TWS. It uses about 1.6GB memory, CPU at peak was about 60%. None of the cores is maxed out.
As someone who is in the industry, I recommend (as of right now) to get a Sandy Bridge system. The Core i7-2600k processor is extremely fast, energy efficient and considered cheap (price vs. performance vs. efficiency). The chipset had a minor setback upon launch, but it's all good now. If you are a system builder, look for the B3 revision code.
Benchmarks are just benchmarks, but if you're curious to see where the i7-2600k stands, check out CPU Benchmarks.
As for multi-monitor support, a video card I recommend is the AMD FirePro 2460. It's fanless (no noise), has excellent driver support and is not that expensive (about 200-250$ CDN). FYI, you will need Windows 7 64-bit to handle more than 3 monitors.