MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

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LRP
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MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby LRP » 19 Dec 2015

Dear All

I intend to configure and setup a new but energy saving system for running it 24/5.
This PC is dedicated to run only MC and IB TWS (standalone? or web based?) for about 8 Symbols/Charts.

Proposal:
Mainboard e.g. http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3700-ITX/ with 16 GB RAM (max.)
Alternative maybe an Intel NUC or similar small quiet system.
2-3 Displays or 1 with 4K@60Hz connected to onboard graphic card. (No external graphic card monster heater)

Your knowledge and experiences about such ideas would be very appreciated and can help me and maybe others of our great community.
Please share your comments for:
- Hardware and it's setup
- Windows version (7? 8.1? 10?) for best performance and stability
- and other things to consider

Thanks a lot.

Roman

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TJ
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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby TJ » 19 Dec 2015

Dear All

I intend to configure and setup a new but energy saving system for running it 24/5.
This PC is dedicated to run only MC and IB TWS (standalone? or web based?) for about 8 Symbols/Charts.

Proposal:
Mainboard e.g. http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3700-ITX/ with 16 GB RAM (max.)
Alternative maybe an Intel NUC or similar small quiet system.
2-3 Displays or 1 with 4K@60Hz connected to onboard graphic card. (No external graphic card monster heater)

Your knowledge and experiences about such ideas would be very appreciated and can help me and maybe others of our great community.
Please share your comments for:
- Hardware and it's setup
- Windows version (7? 8.1? 10?) for best performance and stability
- and other things to consider

Thanks a lot.

Roman
The computing requirement depends a lot on how you trade.
Just telling us the number of symbols means very little.

Are you swing trading stocks?
or high-speed high-frequency daytrading arbitration futures?

What kind of charts are you using? ticks? non-standard boxes?
How many charts?
How many lines of code are you running in total?
How far in history do you have on your charts?
Do you have many drawing objects?
Are you running any dll? ADE? arrays?

For a trading computer,
I always recommend the most powerful and reliable computer you can afford.

Energy saving should be the least of your concerns.

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LRP
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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby LRP » 19 Dec 2015

Thank you TJ for your fast answer. However I prefer to be, as good as I can, a green trader.... :-)
The Trading settings are.

Symbols:
Futures: ESTX50, Dax, Bund, ES, NQ, YM
Currencies: EUR, CHF

Charts:
8 Symbols and per symbol one set of
1xdaily, 1xhourly, 1xminutes (1-30min.)

Systems/Indicators (1-3) per Chart:
Usual things, maybe Jurik/Hull stuff
No ADE, no dll, no arrays

Estimated Trades per Day:
5-15 discretionary
0-10 (semi-)automated

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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby txls » 19 Dec 2015

4K@60Hz
Not sure Intel onboard videos currently support this, usually it's 4K@30Hz.

And as much as I like the concept of a <10W CPU in a 24/5 PC, I personally wouldn't choose the N-series over the current (s.1150-1151-1155) G-series Pentiums or even Celerons.

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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby TJ » 19 Dec 2015

Thank you TJ for your fast answer. However I prefer to be, as good as I can, a green trader.... :-)
::
This is like going to the Formula One race with a Prius.
If the end goal is saving energy, not winning the race, it would work.

You have to set your priority straight -- do you want to trade efficiently? or do you want to save energy?
Nobody can answer that question for you, you have to experiment and determine for yourself.
The bottom line is, Power=Energy. The more powerful the computer, the more energy it consumes. All the energy consumption ratings are labelled on all the components, so it is not a difficult task to work out the end result. As far as I can see, all the similar components on the market are very conservative and competitive these days. So the question really boils down to is -- how much computing power compromises are you willing to accept in order to save energy? And how much energy are you going to save? 50W? 100W? We are talking about the savings of a light bulb's worth of power?

e.g.
The most powerful NUC i7 is NOT a quad core.
Did you know that? Does it matter to you?
The NUC is still a pretty powerful computer. Many people are happily trading on an older and lesser dual core, so the NUC would probably work. But bear in mind even the fastest NUC is not a minimally acceptable game computer by today's teenager standard.

The NUC can handle 4K better than most of the existing computer. Not sure about multi-screen though. I don't know why you would want to use 4K for trading. Is the chart image sharp enough? How do you want to implement multi-screen?

Can the NUC handle 24/5 in a trading configuration? I am not sure. Most of the consumer application will have the NUC sitting idle 20/7. MultiCharts will have it running non-stop; the fan-less design would concern me.

It uses notebook RAM (one time extra cost).

The W10 OS is compulsory auto-upgrade. ie. Microsoft will automatically upgrade your Windows when a new patch comes out. There is no option not to upgrade because the old version will expire and stop working. The upgrade might involve rebooting.

If you add up all the pieces to build a workable NUC, you will find it is no cheaper than a better desktop.

Many people trade on their laptops, they don't use much energy, and they work fine.

YMMV

ps. I would love to hear any trading experience using this NUC thingy.

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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby JoshM » 20 Dec 2015

Thank you TJ for your fast answer. However I prefer to be, as good as I can, a green trader.... :-)
You have to set your priority straight -- do you want to trade efficiently? or do you want to save energy?
Nobody can answer that question for you, you have to experiment and determine for yourself. The bottom line is, Power=Energy. The more powerful the computer, the more energy it consumes. All the energy consumption ratings are labelled on all the components, so it is not a difficult task to work out the end result. As far as I can see, all the similar components on the market are very conservative and competitive these days. So the question really boils down to is -- how much computing power compromises are you willing to accept in order to save energy? And how much energy are you going to save? 50W? 100W? We are talking about the savings of a light bulb's worth of power?
I also try to be mindful of the energy choices that I make LRP, but I don't think this needs to affect which computer you use. Like TJ already says, a more powerful computer is a big help in trading.

Have you thought about offsetting your carbon footprint LRP? This source says that a desktop computer, when on for 8 hours per day, emits/causes 175 kg of CO2 per year. The rate to offset CO2 is 9.90 dollar per tonne CO2 with a non-profit organisation like COTAP.

So instead of choosing a computer that may not serve your trading needs best, why not buy the best computer with the money you want to spend on it, and then offset your CO2 emission every year? Since that offsetting is so cheap, you can probably pay the commission you'd otherwise spend on one trade to be a 'green trader' for a whole year, while still having a powerful computer that doesn't let you down when the markets get hectic. :)

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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby arnie » 20 Dec 2015

Get the best computer money can buy (that you can afford, without going crazy).

The fact that you're not using tick charts can remove a lot of pressure from the computer's processor and memory but even so, don't buy nothing less than a i7 and 12gb of ram.

My trading desktop has an i5 processor which performs amazingly well but the fact is that through the years I've been noticing that its performance has been declining.
The reason for that declining are the markets and how they trade nowadays.
I use volume profile in my trading which means I use primarily tick data, and while during normal market hours my processor runs between 10 and 20%, everytime there's a volume spike (which nowadays they happen several times a day with HFT's programs triggering orders) it spikes to 100% very easily.
Since I only have 6 symbols on where only 4 of them have minute and daily charts opened, the other two are only in the scanner, the spikes to 100% are for a second or two. But if I have one of my workspaces with a couple of indicators that are processing volume in realtime, doing some stats in realtime, things can become problematic. A solution is not having that specific workspace opened for economic data releases to prevent any type of freezing during quote processing or opening one MC in my Surface, running that specific indicator while trading in my desktop with the other MC.

I understand your view in maintaining everything as much "green" as possible but there're things one cannot escape from.

Buy a super processor, do not cut cost on it!

On the other hand, why do you need a 4k screen for trading? I know, I'm the same way, those 4k screens are indeed beautiful, but we're talking about trading here, not viewing the movie Avatar. The extra money you'll spend in the screen, BUY A GOOD AND FAST PROCESSOR.

JoshM did put it nicely. Never thought about offsetting my CO2 footprint. Need to think about that.

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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby LRP » 23 Dec 2015

Tanks a lot guys for your valuable thoughts. However, avoiding carbon dioxide is better then just buy questionable certificates.
I probably will go for a Intel NUC with a Skylake CPU i7 soon available. Should be strong enough, small case, nearly quiet, 4k@60Hz and last but not least energy efficient.
Maybe like this one:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... newestnucs
or as seen on rumor like:
http://www.fanlesstech.com/2015/12/the- ... r.html?m=1

Any other ideas?

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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby virginiatrader » 25 Dec 2015

LRP:

Please leave the rest of us enough CO2 to get by on. I like my vegetable garden green in the summer.

Good trading!

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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby TJ » 18 May 2016

Tanks a lot guys for your valuable thoughts. However, avoiding carbon dioxide is better then just buy questionable certificates.
I probably will go for a Intel NUC with a Skylake CPU i7 soon available. Should be strong enough, small case, nearly quiet, 4k@60Hz and last but not least energy efficient.
Maybe like this one:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... newestnucs
or as seen on rumor like:
http://www.fanlesstech.com/2015/12/the- ... r.html?m=1

Any other ideas?
Whatever happened to your green energy saving NUC experiment?

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LRP
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Re: MC @ Eco-PC for 24/5

Postby LRP » 18 May 2016

Tanks a lot guys for your valuable thoughts. However, avoiding carbon dioxide is better then just buy questionable certificates.
I probably will go for a Intel NUC with a Skylake CPU i7 soon available. Should be strong enough, small case, nearly quiet, 4k@60Hz and last but not least energy efficient.
Maybe like this one:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... newestnucs
or as seen on rumor like:
http://www.fanlesstech.com/2015/12/the- ... r.html?m=1

Any other ideas?
Whatever happened to your green energy saving NUC experiment?
Hi TJ
I am still paper-evaluating :) a new system like:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... h-nuc.html

Because i do not like noise during trading, I am not sure if a common solution with a Micro/Mini-Tower and quite components are much better, as well because of probably much more higher bang for bucks.

Any other real life experiences out there?


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