After some serious thrashing, I concluded the following:
A 200mhz machine with only 32 megs ram a cheezy video card and win 98 has served me fairly well up until recently.
A few profitable trades have been missed do to quote freezes.
Building a perfect super computer is wholly unnecessary (at this time).
NT 4 is wholly unnecessary (at this time).
It is very necessary that I play some of these great games!
I do need a faster machine to prevent the occasional quote freezes.
For instance, I did not short GEND wednesday morning for the sole reason that the volume was giving my machine fits. That trade alone would have banked plenty o cash for building 'pooters.
Also, I concluded that, since I have the monitors laying around anyway, I should definitely blow the extra $$$ on more video cards and load the PCI slots right up. I will utilize the extra pixels by expanding my quotes to include more broad market indicators - should pay off.
I will most likely build another machine or two in no time because:
A, This will be fun.
B, Something I got to have will come along soon.
And
C, My wife will need a trading machine in a few more months ( I am stalling for as long as I can, I need to get a BIG head start, because she will prolly out trade me by a mile. )
All this led me to the idea that I should forget about dual HD's. I will mix business and pleasure. A few LS-120 diskettes for back up should suffice. If playing too much UNREAL can degrade and destroy this awesome IBM HD, so be it. I can always go to my old box in an emergency.
So this is what I did:
From Minotaur:
2 Corsair - CM654S128-BX2 at $265/ea totalling $530
1 Intel Boxed CPUs - Celeron 300A MHz - SL32A - Tested at 450MHz at
$123/ea totalling $123
1 ABIT - BH6 Pentium II at $98/ea totalling $98
The total of your order is $751 dollars which does not include
shipping fees.
ya I am going over board on the ram. If it looks as though it never gets used i can toss it into the next box. I am not worried about it.
I got the CPU, MB and Memory all from one vendor so that if I cannot get a stable 450, I can deal with one place. And I blew the twenty bux on the test, most likely a waste of $20, but then I will, hopefully, have some recourse if i can't get a stable 450m out of it.
That was the thought anyway.
From TJT:
1 DTTA371440 IBM 9.5ms/ 512k/ 7200rpm ULTRA/DMA EIDE DESKSTAR 14GXP $329.00
1 EIDEKits EIDE Hard Drive Kits $5.00
1 HDCooler Just Cooler for Hard Drive $19.00
Shipping $17.00
TOTAL $370.00
Thanks ZP for the link to TJT they were very reasonable!
I am sure the cooler is overkill, but it looked like fun. I'll post how it works out.
From BUYCOMP.COM
HI-VAL INC.
601957: LS-120
A:DRIVE 3.5HHFDD
120MB IDE
READ/WRITE
1.44MB-FD $86.95
DIAMOND
628162: VIPER
V550 16MB AGP
SDRAM 128 BIT
GRAPHICS $122.95
DIAMOND
021709: MONSTER
MX300 PCI 320
VOICE WAVETABLE $78.95
ALTEC
LANSING
205639: ACS48
POWERCUBE PLUS
3-PIECE COMPUTER
SPEAKER SYSTEM
W/SUBWOOFER $97.95
The Hi-Val 40X CD-rom was out of stock at BUYCOMP, so I went to another vendor.
Also snapping up two
DIAMOND VIPER V330
8MB AGP SDRAM 128 BIT
$79.95
And a TurboExpress Port 920 from Pacific CommWare.
This is an upgrade that will "hopefully" increase my throughput from the 3com ISDN modem. It was pointless to bother with the dog I am using now. Hopefully it will pay off with the new box.
All this is going into a SC750-A Full Tower ATX from Micro pro for $152.00
This box will run three monitors that I already have. one 19" and two 17".
One PCI slot will remain. Most likely it will end up with a network card. If a DVD player becomes a "must have" for me, perhaps an ISA network card could make room for the DVD card.
OR
The viper 550 might be good enough for gaming, the banshee's got cruddy reviews. So the last PCI slot could wind up with a VOODOO II or III in it.
This box should give me:
1: Stable quotes even in extreme conditions ie: an IPO, a rough market open, AMZN...
2: Plenty of pixels for Real Tick III charts and quotes, a couple of web pages, and a couple of chatrooms.
3: Plenty of HD space for lots of serious applications and serious games, MP3's and general clutter.
4: Way too much ram.
5: Excellent gaming.
6: A case I will never out grow <ggggg>
I almost went with Mushkin for the CPU, MoBo, and Memory. Maybe next time.
This is my first stab at putting a box together. I admit going to excess on some stuff. Any comments are appreciated, although the trigger has already been pulled, this won't be the last box I put together.
funk |
