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Hi,
I am putting together a Desktop for watching stock market charts.
I will be connecting 12 Monitors ( Dell U2412M x 24 inch, 1920x1200 ) to this desktop.

Mostly I will be using 2 stock applications & couple of Word Docs & some webpages simultaneously.

OS will be Windows -7 ( Ultimate )

I will be using three ATI FirePro 2460 Graphics cards. ( I did a lot of research & chose these Low Profile cards ) AMD has specifically designed these cards for stock market applications & are used by many professionals.

I am not sure but Intel i7 2600 3.4 GHz processor should be enough ?

I am thinking about 8 GB GB DDR3 RAM

I need one DVD-RW

I guess Onboard Sound would be good enough.

Although I don’t have a budget restriction & want to build the best system, I am limited to the parts available where I am located. So you guys need to pick the parts from the following 2 websites. I am importing graphics cards since they are not available here.

http://www.theitdepot.com/
http://www.deltapage.com/

Thank You all.

give me a dollar.

Ok since you don't have a budget you might as well get 16 gb ram that's only 100$ , corsair vengeance is fine. As for a motherboard I would go gigabyte or asus you just have to make sure it has 3 pcie 16 slots,I don't think a 4x pcie 16 slot will limit the amount of monitors as long as you have 2 8x slots and a 4x slot for video cards. I would probably do a z68 board that would allow you to use the on board graphics on the CPU along with video cards. No budget means definitely get a big solid state drive for is and most programs 200+ gb along with 2 hdd say 2 caviar black 2 tb a d run raid for data backup.
I am sure many will chime in on specific ssdrives,MB choice and so on.
Good luck. One more thing I don't think you will have to overclock and since the k models with unlocked multipliers have disabled functions. So it's probably better just to get a plain i72600.

Consider some of these pieces:

Asus P8Z68-V motherboard

Intel Core i7-2600 processor
or Intel Core i7-2600K

2ea 2x 4 GiB PC3-12800 G.Skill Sniper F3-12800CL9D-8GBSR (DDR3-1600, CAS 9, 1.5 V)

Do you really need the professional graphics cards? Would an inexpensive consumer level card with 5 or 6 DisplayPort outputs (like the XFX HD-677X-Z5F3, which supports 5 monitors per card) do the job?

240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
or 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3
1 TB Western Digital WD1002FAEX Caviar Black hard-drive

LG Blu-ray drive

Corsair TX750 V2 power supply
Antec Sonata Proto ATX case

Do you need keyboard, mouse, speakers, cables, UPS, etc.?

Might as well get 5 SSDs in RAID 6. If you install the OS on one drive it could fail. Then you'd have to order a replacement, wait for it to be delivered, then spend several more hours or a day to install the OS and your programs and get everything set up the way you like. That is a lot of time spent not trading.

Do you really need the professional graphics cards? Would an inexpensive consumer level card with 5 or 6 DisplayPort outputs (like the XFX HD-677X-Z5F3, which supports 5 monitors per card) do the job?

Yes, but since many professionals use them & AMD says they specially designed FirePro 2460 for traders, I chose them & with no moving parts & low profile also was a plus.

I did consider ATI 6870 with 6 DPs but it takes up 2 slots & has fan & with lots of dust & humidity, chances of failure I thought were high.

I do have extra keyboard, mice, power cables & speakers but would need UPS.

Do I need any other cables ? Monitors & Video Cards are coming with cables.

For my current Dell XPS, I have 5 HDDs & I clone the drive every night using Acronis True Home. For a non tech guy, this is the best I could do. Any other ideas welcome though. I have no clue of RAID & no local hardware shops where I live has any idea of them either.

JustAnEngineer has put together good combinations it seems.

Can I go for 3 x 4 = 12 GB RAM ? or does it have to be either 8 OR 16 ?

I'm not familiar with drive cloning using that program, but I agree that you should do that or any kind of solution that will help you have little/no downtime in case your OS drive fails.

RAM installs in pairs. So you could do either 8gb or 16gb... I imagine that 8 would be fine for your application and you most likely would see no difference at all with 16... but if there were a problem you could also upgrade easily later.

MJZ82 wrote:

I'm not familiar with drive cloning using that program, but I agree that you should do that or any kind of solution that will help you have little/no downtime in case your OS drive fails.

RAM installs in pairs. So you could do either 8gb or 16gb... I imagine that 8 would be fine for your application and you most likely would see no difference at all with 16... but if there were a problem you could also upgrade easily later.

Cloning using Acronis is the easiest thing to do. Few clicks & in 1.5 Hrs it clones 500 GB HDD. That way I always have 4 extra identical drives with only little data missing for the day it crashes. One crash long time taught me a very expensive lesson.

I am using little gadget called overview cpu to see RAM usage. It hasn't gone over 75% with maximum apps & windows open so I guess I will be ok.

But that is with one monitor though. I am not sure what would happen when there are 12 monitors.

I would go the 16gb path since you probably run A ton of programs or VMs on those 12 monitors. Have you ever maxed 8gb of memory?Sure is better to have alot more memory then you need then not enough. Corsair just listed a 4 stick 32gb set recently, but it's not cheap at all having cherry picked mem modules and 8 gb per stick all matched up to perfection:)

vargis14 wrote:

I would go the 16gb path since you probably run A ton of programs or VMs on those 12 monitors. Have you ever maxed 8gb of memory?Sure is better to have alot more memory then you need then not enough. Corsair just listed a 4 stick 32gb set recently, but it's not cheap at all having cherry picked mem modules and 8 gb per stick all matched up to perfection:)

I agree.

Although I haven't maxed out 8 GB on my single monitor, I don't know what will happen with 12 of them.

At that point, if you're going to put tons of RAM in it, and if your budget is v. high, I think it may be worth it to look into dual-socket (server) motherboards with ECC support. You could put two 6-core Xeons in there, and the RAM would be much cheaper (~$100 per ECC 8 GiB DIMM vs. ~$200 per non-ECC 8 GiB DIMM)

JustAnEngineer wrote:

240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
or 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3
1 TB Western Digital WD1002FAEX Caviar Black hard-drive

Of these I would stick with the mechanical drives in a raid 10 (or 0+1 or 1+0 or whatever) setup. This means that you would have to get 4 drives in total, and would loose half of your storage space. The benefit, however, is that you can have a hard drive failure and without even shutting down your PC (depending on motherboard or raid card support) swap out a new one.

I'd stay away from solid state drives for a few reasons. Their have been a lot of firmware issues since their release. For a gaming rig it isn't a big deal to have a potential storage time bomb sitting in your system, but this is for your job. Also, I haven't read much on how they actually fail and what kind of real-world timeframe it takes for them to go. All of your programs, once loaded, will be running out of RAM anyway, so once it is all set you probably wouldn't see a huge difference in performance between a mechanical drive and a solid state.

I'd stay away from solid state drives for a few reasons. Their have been a lot of firmware issues since their release. For a gaming rig it isn't a big deal to have a potential storage time bomb sitting in your system, but this is for your job. Also, I haven't read much on how they actually fail and what kind of real-world timeframe it takes for them to go.

Sandforce drives have alot of firmware issues. Intel prides themselves on having the lowest failure rates, etc. Crucial SSD's have a pretty low failure rate (or high approval rating) as well. The way I see it, firmware problems are most likely to start on day 1, or not happen at all. First thing you should do is update firmware, that gives you the best chance at avoiding problems.

Heres a nice article to put "reliablity" of SSD's into perspective. Even though they focus mainly on Intel SSD's since that's whats used most in the server world, I found it to be an interesting read. Enterprise SSD's are probably a good idea to further reduce the chances of failures.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html
While I don't know how SSD's fit into your RAID/backup needs, I can say this: Having an SSD will make your system much snappier (loading/opening windows, etc), possibly a good thing for those quick trades? Downside...SSD's don't have the capacity that most people need at a cost they can afford which means they're generally paired with a HDD to handle mass-storage duties.

Get 16GB of RAM, ram is cheap these days (~$100 for 16GB) and you'll probably have many programs/windows open to fill 8 monitors so more ram is better.

the i7 2600 (not K series) is my CPU recommendation. 1) yes, the "K" series have some features disabled (they may or may not apply to your needs) and 2) I doubt you'll be looking to overclock and potentially shorten the lifespan of your processor.

This looks to be an awesome build! pictures would be nice to see when you're done? Not everyday one gets to see an 8 monitor setup.

LaChupacabra wrote:

JustAnEngineer wrote:

240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
or 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3
1 TB Western Digital WD1002FAEX Caviar Black hard-drive

Of these I would stick with the mechanical drives in a raid 10 (or 0+1 or 1+0 or whatever) setup. This means that you would have to get 4 drives in total, and would loose half of your storage space. The benefit, however, is that you can have a hard drive failure and without even shutting down your PC (depending on motherboard or raid card support) swap out a new one.

I'd stay away from solid state drives for a few reasons. Their have been a lot of firmware issues since their release. For a gaming rig it isn't a big deal to have a potential storage time bomb sitting in your system, but this is for your job. Also, I haven't read much on how they actually fail and what kind of real-world timeframe it takes for them to go. All of your programs, once loaded, will be running out of RAM anyway, so once it is all set you probably wouldn't see a huge difference in performance between a mechanical drive and a solid state.

The idea of Raid 10 ( 0 + 1 OR 1 + 0 ) sounds good but this is my first attempt to build a system & I still know next to nothing about what to do when I get all the parts.
Most hardware stores ( Very Few ) in my area have never put a raid system together so I seriously doubt I can do it myself.

DPete27 wrote:

I'd stay away from solid state drives for a few reasons. Their have been a lot of firmware issues since their release. For a gaming rig it isn't a big deal to have a potential storage time bomb sitting in your system, but this is for your job. Also, I haven't read much on how they actually fail and what kind of real-world timeframe it takes for them to go.

Sandforce drives have alot of firmware issues. Intel prides themselves on having the lowest failure rates, etc. Crucial SSD's have a pretty low failure rate (or high approval rating) as well. The way I see it, firmware problems are most likely to start on day 1, or not happen at all. First thing you should do is update firmware, that gives you the best chance at avoiding problems.

Heres a nice article to put "reliablity" of SSD's into perspective. Even though they focus mainly on Intel SSD's since that's whats used most in the server world, I found it to be an interesting read. Enterprise SSD's are probably a good idea to further reduce the chances of failures.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html
While I don't know how SSD's fit into your RAID/backup needs, I can say this: Having an SSD will make your system much snappier (loading/opening windows, etc), possibly a good thing for those quick trades? Downside...SSD's don't have the capacity that most people need at a cost they can afford which means they're generally paired with a HDD to handle mass-storage duties.

Get 16GB of RAM, ram is cheap these days (~$100 for 16GB) and you'll probably have many programs/windows open to fill 8 monitors so more ram is better.

the i7 2600 (not K series) is my CPU recommendation. 1) yes, the "K" series have some features disabled (they may or may not apply to your needs) and 2) I doubt you'll be looking to overclock and potentially shorten the lifespan of your processor.

This looks to be an awesome build! pictures would be nice to see when you're done? Not everyday one gets to see an 8 monitor setup.

Would love to show you but it might be a while because not everything is available readily here.

georgetok wrote:

The idea of Raid 10 ( 0 + 1 OR 1 + 0 ) sounds good but this is my first attempt to build a system & I still know next to nothing about what to do when I get all the parts.
Most hardware stores ( Very Few ) in my area have never put a raid system together so I seriously doubt I can do it myself.

Raid is really not very difficult to set up. Most motherboards have good step-by-step instructions on how to do this, and with Windows 7 it is really easy to install it correctly (windows XP timed out waiting for user input to install the raid drivers, 7 does not). If you don't feel like taking a chance with a more advanced setup on your first build that's understandable, too. Your current system of multiple drives would still work in a new PC.

LaChupacabra wrote:

georgetok wrote:

The idea of Raid 10 ( 0 + 1 OR 1 + 0 ) sounds good but this is my first attempt to build a system & I still know next to nothing about what to do when I get all the parts.
Most hardware stores ( Very Few ) in my area have never put a raid system together so I seriously doubt I can do it myself.

Raid is really not very difficult to set up. Most motherboards have good step-by-step instructions on how to do this, and with Windows 7 it is really easy to install it correctly (windows XP timed out waiting for user input to install the raid drivers, 7 does not). If you don't feel like taking a chance with a more advanced setup on your first build that's understandable, too. Your current system of multiple drives would still work in a new PC.

Thank you.

I will give it a shot after I get all setup. I don't want to make it harder now.

Just one question. Do I need to order & install anything right now if I want to add Raid -1 later ? Would whatever mother board ( Probably Asus P8Z68 ) support Raid -1 ?

georgetok wrote:

Just one question. Do I need to order & install anything right now if I want to add Raid -1 later ? Would whatever mother board ( Probably Asus P8Z68 ) support Raid -1 ?

Yeah that mobo supports RAID 1. You don't have to install or order anything special if you want to do RAID later, but you'll have to either create a image of your drive and put in on the new RAID setup or install a new OS on your RAID setup and start from scratch. Neither is hard to do but if you do decide to do a mirror you'll need another storage device that is outside the RAID setup like a external drive to store that data. Also you may run into a lot of headaches if you just transfer the data through imaging as the OS will have to deal with being on a RAID drive all of a sudden and you'll have to install drivers for the OS. A lot of times the OS will fail to load and you'll have to try using the recovery console or OS repair. I dunno if pre-installing the RAID drivers to the OS will work or not since I never tried that. So in the end it's usually a lot easier and take even less time to just install a new OS and transfer your other files than creating a disk image.
For RAID 1 you also don't need identical drives but the total storage volume will be limited to the smaller drive in the array. However if you are going to do a RAID array in addition to whatever drive setup you already have, then all you need to do is just enable the RAID array from the bios for the drives that you want to enable it for... which is a feature that particular mobo should support.

RAID is fairly easy to set up. It is not, however, something that someone without a lot of computer building experience should be messing with. You are adding a lot of potential heartache and trouble to your build if you mess with RAID. Watercooling would be another thing that you should stay far away from as an inexperienced computer builder. Keep it simple.

Just make sure you show us those 12 monitors running everything at once with the task manager and all,dying to see memory/cpu usage,plus 12 monitors:)

FirePro V4900 could be the ticket for you:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/21930