My decade old Dell workstation just crapped out and looking for a replacement. Should I go for Xeon or i7 in the new rig? ET Pro is my trading platform with minimum of 3 monitors. I'll be using the rig for regular office stuff, watching vids and surfing the web outside of trading (hundreds of tabs at a time). Looking for max stability in the new rig as any hiccup during a trade can be costly. Any thoughts? Thanks.
You have hundreds of tabs open at a time? How do you even keep track of all the tabs? It depends on how fault tolerant your trading is. If you swing trade or longer, then you probably don't need something extremely fault tolerant. i7 would be fine. If you day trade and need 100% up-time, then Xeon might offer better reliability (only Xeon supports ECC memory). I don't recall the last time my laptop crashed and I suspect that it's mostly due to software rather than hardware improvements. I don't recall the last time I saw the blue screen of death.
Visiting many internet sites/tabs on a computer going to be used to trade real money. Real smart(sarcasm intended)
Not an issue when precautions are taken. Blocking most scripting, popups etc in browsers being critical. Obviously don't install anything suspect. Even better when using Linux.
Scat will be along later to tell you about deals. Dell refurb store is the place to look for a 4820 workstation.
I’ve had dells for about a decade (all the lines) and haven’t had any issues. The biggest driver of performance for me was getting an SSD. It seems to be the dell SSD hardrives are crazy expensive.
If you want the latest and greatest, Dell Dimension T5820. It's probably waay different from anything you've seen so far. All modular with rack-mounted drives... like servers (Dell claims drives are hot-swapable, but that hasn't been my experience... needed to reboot for the system to recognize the new drive. Still, rack-mounted drives have a bit of a cool factor if you're a computer geek kind of guy). If you want to save some money while still having the function, look for Dell Dimension T5810 on eBay. Tons available, any configuration you want. Some come with warranty, and you can usually buy a Square Trade warranty for not much $$ if you want. If you go this route, suggest E5-1620 v3 CPU or better. You shouldn't need to spend more than $400, max... $250-$300 would be more like average cost. (I have 4x, T5810s in my home network.) I don't know about "hundreds of tabs"... never tried that many.