Hi Dominick,
I bought a Dell Precision workstation for trading a little over 3 years ago. Back then, we still had the 'INUT craze' and Dell tried to capitalize on the tech trading hype by selling workstations actually called 'trading stations'. Nice thing is back then they offered boxes with the Matrox G200 MMS quad LCD card, which is what I bought the machine with, along with four 17" digital LCDs... Today, the best you can get from Dell (preconfigured) is a dual monitor card. If that is good enough for you, they have a wide choice of Precision workstations, both single CPU and Xeon dual processor capable models. If you are mostly looking at 2D trading data, I would think a single CPU system with 1GB of ram should be sufficient. Key for me though, was quad monitor support. If you want that, HP sells workstations pre-configured with the NVIDIA Quadro4 400NVS 64mb PCI card. I've used the Matrox equipped machine with Windows 2000 since purchase with not even one crash, and the Matrox card is very stable. Don't have any experience with NVIDIA 4 monitor video, perhaps someone out there can comment on their software support for applications across multiple monitors and stability.
Good luck,
John
PS - There are other options out there, I recall seeing a small firm at the NYC trading expo that builds trading machines, including three screen laptops, but can't remember the name - I'm sure you could find them by searching on the web.... |
