Prebuilt for number crunching?

SpeculatorSeth · August 17, 2020

I'm looking for suggestions on prebuilt pc's that would help you maximize your processing power. The use case here is for day trading and historical backtesting. In such a system you don't need a great videocard. You'll need multiple displays but even the low end graphics cards seem to be fine. Memory you need at least 16gb ram if not 32gb. Having a fast hard drive is important, but it doesn't need to be very big. So you can kind of skimp on everything else and just go for the best processor. The applications also multi-thread really well so you'd definitely want to go for a Ryzen processor.

I'm one of those guys that always builds the machine myself. Looking around I think I could put a system together for $600 that would give you a Ryzen 3600 with the right deals. However, a lot of the guys in my community are just not comfortable building a PC on their own. So I'm looking for what the best deals would be for a prebuilt at $600, $1000, and $1500+ price points. I was looking at maingear and ibuypower, but it doesn't look like their specs were very comparable for $600. Got any suggestions for other places to look that might focus less on gaming and more on processing power?

samcool55 · August 17, 2020

Well you also pay for support and support is EXPENSIVE AF so usually that's the reason for the price gap.

Also look for workstations, render machines or just your average desktop. They are usually more geared towards raw cpu and less gpu.

LIGISTX · August 17, 2020

4 minutes ago, SpeculatorSeth said:

I'm looking for suggestions on prebuilt pc's that would help you maximize your processing power. The use case here is for day trading and historical backtesting. In such a system you don't need a great videocard. You'll need multiple displays but even the low end graphics cards seem to be fine. Memory you need at least 16gb ram if not 32gb. Having a fast hard drive is important, but it doesn't need to be very big. So you can kind of skim on everything else and just go for the best processor. The applications also multi-thread really well so you'd definitely want to go for a Ryzen processor.

I'm one of those guys that always builds the machine myself. Looking around I think I could put a system together for $600 that would give you a Ryzen 3600 with the right deals. However, a lot of the guys in my community are just not comfortable building a PC on their own. So I'm looking for what the best deals would be for a prebuilt at $600, $1000, and $1500+ price points. I was looking at maingear and ibuypower, but it doesn't look like their specs were very comparable for $600. Got any suggestions for other places to look that might focus less on gaming and more on processing power?

I think serious stock trader machines are intel water cooled affairs. Maximum speed for fastest possible reaction to market fluctuations. That said, I’m not sure that is exactly what your doing here... and I am not exactly sure what you actually need.

If more threads is important, Ryzen is the answer. If more RAW speed is important, Intel is your answer. I’m thinking the sort of trading and analysis your looking at isn’t focused around raw speed and a Ryzen 3600 would be plenty fine.

As to where to buy them, anywhere..? Dell, HP, HPE, Lenovo etc. Everyone only has intel or AMD to choose from, so any of the “business class” machines will likely have options that don’t look particularly fancy, but have the CPU you want and no extra not needed video card.

LIGISTX · August 17, 2020

3 minutes ago, Cvet76 said:

Prebuilt PCs will always cost more than if you build them yourself. Most of the times absurdly more expensive.

Not really true, if you get a basic machine (decent CPU and RAM), the price gap can be as little as 75-100 bucks vs building it yourself. On high end gaming stuff, that usually widens to multiple hundred dollars.

jaslion · August 17, 2020

2 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

I think serious stock trader machines are intel water cooled affairs. Maximum speed for fastest possible reaction to market fluctuations. That said, I’m not sure that is exactly what your doing here... and I am not exactly sure what you actually need.

If more threads is important, Ryzen is the answer. If more RAW speed is important, Intel is your answer. I’m thinking the sort of trading and analysis your looking at isn’t focused around raw speed and a Ryzen 3600 would be plenty fine.

As to where to buy them, anywhere..? Dell, HP, HPE, Lenovo etc. Everyone only has intel or AMD to choose from, so any of the “business class” machines will likely have options that don’t look particularly fancy, but have the CPU you want and no extra not needed video card.

Stock trading machines have long since moved away from typical desktop solutions and are now using specific hardware to do so. Individual stock trading machines are now reliant on more parallel processing from what I've read than single core performance mainly due to intel having high core xeons that don't have great single core performance.

SpeculatorSeth · August 17, 2020

37 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Stock trading machines have long since moved away from typical desktop solutions and are now using specific hardware to do so. Individual stock trading machines are now reliant on more parallel processing from what I've read than single core performance mainly due to intel having high core xeons that don't have great single core performance.

That's correct, especially for retail traders. You're not going to compete in the HFT space where they need specialized hardware that can time things down to microseconds. It's going to be more scanning the market for new moves, or back-testing across a large set of historical data. The tasks we're talking about are usually fairly simple. Maybe some floating point math, manipulating hash maps, but nothing too wild. The issue is you're doing it over lots of data. I easily max out all the cores of my 1700x when doing a backtest. For myself I think my next PC will need to be a threadripper. So this is the perfect case where the multiple cores makes a difference. Hence why I thought this specific use case might be interesting to the people on this forum.

Looking at the mainstream workplace desktops like HP, Dell, or Lenovo it looks like they're all basically intel shops?

jaslion · August 17, 2020

27 minutes ago, SpeculatorSeth said:

That's correct, especially for retail traders. You're not going to compete in the HFT space where they need specialized hardware that can time things down to microseconds. It's going to be more scanning the market for new moves, or back-testing across a large set of historical data. The tasks we're talking about are usually fairly simple. Maybe some floating point math, manipulating hash maps, but nothing too wild. The issue is you're doing it over lots of data. I easily max out all the cores of my 1700x when doing a backtest. For myself I think my next PC will need to be a threadripper. So this is the perfect case where the multiple cores makes a difference. Hence why I thought this specific use case might be interesting to the people on this forum.

Looking at the mainstream workplace desktops like HP, Dell, or Lenovo it looks like they're all basically intel shops?

Yeah almost nobody is giving ryzen a fair chance and forget about ryzen in high end stuff. Intel still has control over manufacturers so that is a shame. What actually would be best is if you buy the systems from a system builder that lets you pick the parts or a local computer shop if you are not willing to do it yourself as well getting your hands on threadripper is basically impossible otherwise for a not stupidly insane price hike.