Hi TJ, I am considering building myself a new computer system. Basically I am running AB on a Mac Pro right now. 8GB Ram (ram is not one my constraints). I am running 2 x quad core Intel Xeon X5365 2.99 Ghz processors.
I use AB for real time day trading... (not backtesting)... but I am pushing the core I run AB on to the max pretty much (My performance indicator in AB runs pretty consistently between 200 - 260%... I also have another 4 charts running on another instance of AB to utilise another core. Question is, in building a new system, what should I be looking for maximise AB performance....? Obviously I am looking at the i7 range of processors. However, given that I can only utilise one core per instance of AB (and I want to run as few instances of AB as possible), should I less concerned with going for more cores and more concerned with perhaps overclocking the cores I do have...? I could go the whole hog and overclock a Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition to 4Ghz... I don't know if that would be overkill given there would be a lot of processing power I couldn't access....? (although having 12Mb of onboard cache looks attractive since I could run larger DB's in AB more quickly). Any other critical issues I should be thinking of in terms of speed running AB...? Thanks for your time.
