Is my PC running ok, or do I need a new one??

Summery:
How to look at the performance of your PC.
What type of a trader are you.
Operating systems.
Type of CPU’s, RAM.
Custom PC builds.


First off lets start be looking at your current PC and see what see how hard its working to determine and weather you need a new one or not. Start by “right” clicking on any part of the “Start” bar, you should get a pull down menu and two thirds of the way down you will see “Task Manager” select it will start the program.

You should see the following, two line charts and two bar charts. The line charts are a graph of history and the bar is instantaneous. One is monitoring CPU usage and the other is monitoring memory usage. NOTE: if you running a dual core or a multi-threaded CPU you CPU graph will be divided into two windows. To combined the two, go to tool bar
View-> CPU History->One Graph, all CPU’s this will allow you to see everything on
one graph. You can also control the update speed View-> Update Speed-> (low, Med, or High).

Also at the bottom we have some numbers in four boxes. The one that’s most important to us is the “Physical Memory” look at the top two. “Total” and “Available” this is a seven digit number (remember we are talking about megabytes). NOTE: if you have 4gigs Windows will only show 3.x gigs. Why is that? That’s a complex subject I don’t want To get into it here. So see what you have available. Keep in mind you want some overhead. How much? That is all user dependent. But if you have every possible application that you would use open all at once and you have less then 100-200Megs left, you are likely running out.

Now lets look at the CPU graph. If the markets are closed you will most likely see the CPU at 4-10% at best. With this window open start up any application and see what happens… what you will want to do is run this program during trading hours and see how much CPU power / memory its using.. keep in mind when markets are very active the usage will be higher. So have a look right at 9:30-10 and then at lunch and then that 2-3pm. That way You get a feel of what is happening in different market conditions.

The first 2+ hours and the last 2+ hours is when you’ll see the highest usage. And also
most of the day on trend days. Since the graph is not very steady you will need to eyeball the average amount of usage on the CPU. if you are at 60-80% of usage on the active hours of the day, you are most likely starting to run out of horse power. And most likely when the data gets very bursty it gets to 90-100%.

Now you have determined that you are in need of a new PC what kind should you buy? How much should you spend? Well that all depends on what type of trader you are.
Are you trading of daily/weekly chats? Do you make 5-7 trades/week? Do you have one monitor and look at 2-3 charts at any given time? Then you will mostly do fine with the standard $500 PC from DELL or HP.

If you are a more active trader with 2 monitors/desktops and each desktop has 2-3 workspaces and 3-6 charts then you will need some thing with more power. you can go to the Dell XPS class of PC’s is a good one will start at $900 but after you add extra RAM (if you need it) and maybe a couple of other options like a dual DVI video card and windows XP you will be at 1000-1200 for sure. NOTE this is for a dual core PC.

Now if you are a trader that’s got a chart application like TS with 4+ monitors 4 desktops with 2-5 tabs in each 4-6 charts in each tap and one streaming all kinds of quotes, and also running a second application like Photon to execute your orders then
You need a “Gaming PC” with lots of power. Here is where the problem comes in..
Dell and HP do not want to deal with people like that. And if there do they send you to there “business class” department and now they want $4000-$6000 to build one.

So what do we do?? Well the there are a number of places out there that will build
A good high performance PC for less then Dell or HP would charge.

So how do we build one? Let me first address the operating system then we can go onto the hardware selection. Ok. XP Pro or Vista. This is a tricky topic but I will give you my take on it and you will have to ask others and come up with your own decision.
Vista is the next and up coming operating system from Microsoft. But just like all there other systems it will take time to get all its issues work out. Most of the problems are user related. The fact is its new and we don’t know how to use it. It tends to be a bit over secure and we have problems getting what we what out of it. Some people tried it and loved it other hated it. So here are my thoughts. Vista needs lots of resources to run. And at the end of the day you have to ask yourself what does vista do for me that XP doesn’t?
So why upgrade my hardware and add Vista to slow it down? And have to deal with a new operating system that I may not be able to operate properly? XP will be around for some time to come. So I’m fine with XP Pro. Now onto the hardware section.

I will try to keep this as simple as possible so you can get an idea of what to buy.

The two main types of CPU that Intel offer at this time is a core 2 (Duo) which most people are calling dual core and a Quad Core. So what is a core 2? It is a CPU that has
2 ALU’s (Arithmetic logic units) this is the thing that does the all the math work.
By having 2 ALU’s running together sharing the same Cache (on chip RAM) it can run programs faster then a signal ALU. And Quad is nothing more then 2 dual cores that are in the same package. One important option to get is a CPU with lots of Cache. The more
The better the performance will be for every day user this is not a big deal but for us it is.
If you are in the “customize” CPU section at Dell or anyone else you will see this.

Onto the RAM, for RAM size everyone seem to have 4gigs in there PC and since its cheap you can just go with 4 and not have to worry about having to upgrade it at a later point. Most ram speeds I see at Dell are 667Mhz and some times 800Mhz, if you see the 800 and you don’t mind the price get it. If you are looking at Ram that seem a bit expensive or it has “ECC” in the name, you are looking at a server grade PC that’s not what you want or need.

Video cards. If you are running only 2 monitors (24” or less) get a dual DVI card. One with 256MB of ram is plenty, we are not playing games so we don’t need heavy graphics processing. And there for the 512MB maybe over kill.


So for most users you can go to Dell pick a dual core build what you need right over the web. You can also build this at a custom builder it may or may not be cheaper. I have not tried. This will/should run two trading applications with out any problems. It’s always going to be application dependent. I hear that Photon needs lots of CPU power and so does TS the two of them together may be a problem. I don’t know for sure.

So now if you feel you need more then that, than its time to go to someone that will build exactly what you need. There they will build you a quad core with all the ram you want and as many video cards as you would like so you can run 4 to 6, 30” monitors if you’d like. I have found the following places that will do this for you. http://www.magicmicro.com/ and http://www.buyxg.com/ . I haven’t bought anything from them yet.

I know this is not an easy subject for most. So if you still have questions or need help selecting the right PC let me know and I will help.