What are the best computers for day trading?
Good equipment can help provide an edge in trading, and speed up the process of crunching numbers and placing trades This is a question we're commonly asked…
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This is a question we're commonly asked, and for good reasons. Good equipment can help provide an edge in trading, and speed up the process of crunching numbers and placing trades. The best computer components and accessories for day traders would ideally include:
Currently we are using intel 11 and 12th generation processor, but 7th or 8th generation Intel i7 processors - these processors have a high number of cores, allowing for faster computation. We'd recommend the i7-7700k or the i7-8700k minimum 16GB RAM, 32GB+ is better. In terms of speed, we'd recommend DDR4 3000mhz+, which will provide an edge over older generations in speed and latency, 32GB+ is better. In terms of speed, we'd recommend DDR4 3000mhz+, which will provide an edge over older generations in speed and latency Solid-state drives (SSDs) as opposed to traditional hard-disk drives (HDDs). SSDs are much faster than HDDs both in their speed and data transfer rates.
What about new something
We recently tested some of the top computers on the market for their performance in running MatLab 2018a. MatLab is software for advanced numerical computation and visualization and is commonly used in statistics. We tested all computers at their core i7-8700k CPU frequency (3.7 GHz), with 16GB DDR4 RAM, and running Windows 10 Home 64-bit. The latest version of MatLab (2018a) was installed on every computer.
The computers we tested were ranked by their MatLab benchmark scores. The higher the score, the better. A perfect score would be 100,000 - this is not possible with any computer on the market presently using a single 8th generation i7 CPU, as any such system will require multi-core computation to achieve that kind of performance.
The best computer components for day trading in 2018 are the ones that provide the highest performance in running MatLab. As you can see, even cheap computers can provide a high score in computations when using only one core. Our top pick is the Dell Inspiron 5676 Gaming Desktop Computer, which provides an excellent value for money at around $1700.
Experts also included some older generation computers from 2015 and 2016, which are still perfectly suitable for running MatLab 2018a - their benchmark scores are very close to the current generation systems. The main difference is in price, where the slightly older systems provide a better value for money ratio. They may not perform as well at other tasks, but for day trading purposes where a single core is used to run computations, these systems perform just as well as the newer ones.
