PC spec

[kagi]

My current PC is just over 3 years old and has an AMD Athlon™ 64 Processor 3500+ 2.20 GHz and 3 GB ram and
I am about to replace it.

I would appreciate it if anyone could offer any suggestions for a Processor, Intel or AMD ? Duo or Quad.
Will these be better for multitasking than my existing set up, which is not to good. (I am a system trader, running a backtest over lots of markets can take 15 minutes and the PC is not much good for anything else whilst it is doing it)

4 GB of ram but is it worth paying more for the higher speed ram

As for the operating system I think it will have to be XP, as one of my trading programmes, Mechanica only works with that. Any thoughts on this?

 

[dcraig1]

The new Intel C2D CPUs with 6 Mb L2 cache are good value for money. I think they are called 85xx series. You should be able to overclock these by quite a bit for extra speed without compromising system stability. If you do overclock, get an after market CPU cooler thats better than the Intel stock cooler. (Ive overclocked a 2.13 Ghz C2D CPU to 3.2 Ghz without any problems at all and the new chips should be even better in that respect.).

Hard to say if a quad core would be better. It might be but it depends on the software you are using. However 85xx will probably overclock better than an Q6600 quad.

Faster memory should help performance, but again it depends on the software. It's really hard to generalize about these things. System performance is a very complex topic. Faster memory is becoming fairly affordable, but DDR3 is still poor value for money compared to DDR2 .

If money is no object get the top of the line quad core, but they are pricy.

Definately go for Intel rather than AMD. Sadly they are currently the performance king and it doesn't look like changing in the immediate future.

 

[mikeeg]

I would agree with dcraig. Intel are much better than AMD performance wise. At the moment, the new QX9770 and QX9775 processors have come out and they are kicking a$$ in terms of performance. Unfortunately they are also kicking up the price too and it's likely to set you back around £1k for these at the moment (around $2200 AUD).

Having said this, unless you are some harcore gaming freak into overclocking, you don't need to settle for the highest quad core currently available on the market....

...but do keep it Intel until AMD sort things out.

Mikey

 

[Huginn]

I'm not sure if it's relevant these days but can a 32-bit operating system address all 4Gb of RAM? I seem to remember this being a limit in the past. More doesn't hurt, it just didn't get used.

H.

 

[dcraig1]

I'm not sure if it's relevant these days but can a 32-bit operating system address all 4Gb of RAM? I seem to remember this being a limit in the past. More doesn't hurt, it just didn't get used.

H.

In general no. Other things (such as graphics cards) are mapped into the 4 Gb address space leaving less than 4Gb of address space for system memory.

 

[fifty2aces]

On the subject of processors, intel c2d e8400 is probably the sweet spot right now for most people. Whether you need quad or dual core depends on the software - if you're mainly looking for backtesting speed, it'll depend whether the software can do multithreaded backtests - I know ninjatrader doesn't, not sure about anything else.

If you can do multithreaded backtests, 4 cores will help, in which case get a q6600. Otherwise, you just want a dual core with a fast clock - E8400 is nice, and apparently it overclocks very well - just get a good cooler.

 

[StockHunter]

Another thing to check out is RAID, it protects your comp from hard-drive failures (not viruses). I find RAID 1 to be the best, but it all depends on what kind of protection you want.

 

[forker]

firstly you dont need to go spend a lot of money to get a good machne that will suit your trading requirements. unless you are doing more intensive operations such as playing games the processing power and over clocking is not needed. intel is a very good chip and dual core are cheaper than quad and more than enough for your trading. just make sure you get a display card that has its own processor and you dont need the biggest one either. mem all you need is 2gb and stay away from vista.. i recommend looking into virtual technology for resilience. if you go down that route you need atleast 3gb of mem, 1gb for host and 2gb for vm