Tech Savvy? After a new computer

[alexmr2]

It's been 3 years since I looked but the most important thing I learned when getting my laptop was that i3. i5, i7 etc have different generations so an old i7 can be worse than a new i3 for example. So on ebay you can get PCs which sound good but are actually an ancient i7 processor.

I think 8th generation is where they made a bigger step up but I'm not familiar with anything newer. Usually the generation number is at the start of the processor number like 9600K would be 9th generation. There's also something about the letters like U means more efficiency and K means more power.

There's a useful website which lets you compare processors which is probably the easiest way to measure overall performance against your current setup or help you decide between two. I think the site I used is:

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/I ... -/4031vs10

[plasteredric]

Not a tech expert but the mistake I made is I got a Nvidia Quadro Card which is specialised for multiple Monitors and for "traders" but is terrible value in terms of performance.
I ended up getting a 4k Monitor as my main screen and couldnt record full screen or have multiple videos running without getting lag on the trading so had to change the graphics card.
Your system only as strong as the weakest part so make sure everything is similiar on a benchmark test.

Do you know what model the card was so I can look it up?

it was had nvs510 which was useless compared to the CPU

benchmarkk.png

Wow that's really bad
What is worse, I just looked up the price. They were retailing around £200 last summer now they're around £400

[Crazyskier]

I bought a high-spec, ray-tracing, water-cooled gaming rig (as below) from Currys around a year ago for £1200, so should be below £1,000 now I guess.

It works great coupled with a 144 Hz ASUS XG32V and I have no issues running several separate versions of BA simultaneously, while streaming video or working on spreadsheets etc.


Time of this report: 2/26/2021, 22:50:05
Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 19041) (19041.vb_release.191206-1406)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Model: ESL Certified PC 2070
BIOS: 0601 (type: UEFI)
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.6GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 16320MB RAM
Page File: 6298MB used, 12453MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 12

Monitor.jpg

It is capable of running several monitors, though I've never found the need, rather simply pinning multiple windows on the same screen.

Hope this helps

CS

[Derek27]

FWIW - i'm of the opinon these days that it's just as economical to split the duties of your laptop across a number of platforms/devices. To this end, I run my laptop plus connect to my VPS on two different logins. VPS' these days are pretty much delivering the same power as a high spec laptop, so it's a no brainer.

I have mine setup with the main laptop screen, plus two 24' monitors either side. the LAPTOP portion is used for standard email/browsing etc, whilst the VPS delivers my betfair activites on one login and my development platform on the other (i also on occassion have 3rd party VPS's that I login to for specific tasks).

If i ever find that I'm running out of *juice*, I can upgrade the package to inculde more RAM and/or double up the cores of the cpu. the entire setup costs just under £20 a month, pretty much in line with a decent laptop's depreciation over 3 years. It honestly depends on what you want to *own* at the end of the 3rd year.

Can you install an OS and software on a VPS or do you need to rent a physical server to do that?

[Anbell]

FWIW - i'm of the opinon these days that it's just as economical to split the duties of your laptop across a number of platforms/devices. To this end, I run my laptop plus connect to my VPS on two different logins. VPS' these days are pretty much delivering the same power as a high spec laptop, so it's a no brainer.

I have mine setup with the main laptop screen, plus two 24' monitors either side. the LAPTOP portion is used for standard email/browsing etc, whilst the VPS delivers my betfair activites on one login and my development platform on the other (i also on occassion have 3rd party VPS's that I login to for specific tasks).

If i ever find that I'm running out of *juice*, I can upgrade the package to inculde more RAM and/or double up the cores of the cpu. the entire setup costs just under £20 a month, pretty much in line with a decent laptop's depreciation over 3 years. It honestly depends on what you want to *own* at the end of the 3rd year.

Can you install an OS and software on a VPS or do you need to rent a physical server to do that?

You choose the OS and can install SW

[jimibt]

FWIW - i'm of the opinon these days that it's just as economical to split the duties of your laptop across a number of platforms/devices. To this end, I run my laptop plus connect to my VPS on two different logins. VPS' these days are pretty much delivering the same power as a high spec laptop, so it's a no brainer.

I have mine setup with the main laptop screen, plus two 24' monitors either side. the LAPTOP portion is used for standard email/browsing etc, whilst the VPS delivers my betfair activites on one login and my development platform on the other (i also on occassion have 3rd party VPS's that I login to for specific tasks).

If i ever find that I'm running out of *juice*, I can upgrade the package to inculde more RAM and/or double up the cores of the cpu. the entire setup costs just under £20 a month, pretty much in line with a decent laptop's depreciation over 3 years. It honestly depends on what you want to *own* at the end of the 3rd year.

Can you install an OS and software on a VPS or do you need to rent a physical server to do that?

yup- you can choose your server version (i use Windows Server 2019). Thereafter, you install whatever software you like. in short, you treat it just like a local machine.

the even better news (for betfair trading) is that the *farm* where my server is located gives me a 2ms ping on the betfair api, compared to 32ms on my home setup -a huge advantage.

betfair-ping.jpg

[Tuco]

I bought a high-spec, ray-tracing, water-cooled gaming rig (as below) from Currys around a year ago for £1200, so should be below £1,000 now I guess.

It works great coupled with a 144 Hz ASUS XG32V and I have no issues running several separate versions of BA simultaneously, while streaming video or working on spreadsheets etc.


Time of this report: 2/26/2021, 22:50:05
Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 19041) (19041.vb_release.191206-1406)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Model: ESL Certified PC 2070
BIOS: 0601 (type: UEFI)
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.6GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 16320MB RAM
Page File: 6298MB used, 12453MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 12

It is capable of running several monitors, though I've never found the need, rather simply pinning multiple windows on the same screen.

Hope this helps

CS

Hi CS - do you think it's necessary to run the monitor Vertical refresh rate at 144Hz?

Could doing so use resources which might otherwise be better deployed?

(I'm running my 144Hz monitors at just 60Hz for this kind of BA stuff.)

Cheers in advance

[Crazyskier]

I bought a high-spec, ray-tracing, water-cooled gaming rig (as below) from Currys around a year ago for £1200, so should be below £1,000 now I guess.

It works great coupled with a 144 Hz ASUS XG32V and I have no issues running several separate versions of BA simultaneously, while streaming video or working on spreadsheets etc.


Time of this report: 2/26/2021, 22:50:05
Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 19041) (19041.vb_release.191206-1406)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Model: ESL Certified PC 2070
BIOS: 0601 (type: UEFI)
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.6GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 16320MB RAM
Page File: 6298MB used, 12453MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 12

It is capable of running several monitors, though I've never found the need, rather simply pinning multiple windows on the same screen.

Hope this helps

CS

Hi CS - do you think it's necessary to run the monitor Vertical refresh rate at 144Hz?

Could doing so use resources which might otherwise be better deployed?

(I'm running my 144Hz monitors at just 60Hz for this kind of BA stuff.)

Cheers in advance

Hi Tuco

It's because I occasionally play Diablo3 / Warcraft / POE etc, hence why I spent half a grand on just the monitor and Corsair mechanical keyboard and gaming mouse.

I'm quite sure you could turn it down for trading and botting only, but there is so much resource available (for my needs), I've never felt the need, particularly since the API changed to streaming rather than polling.

CS

[harry]

I've built a few PCs myself and done quite a bit of research in this area. A few things worth noting:
- Nvidia's Quadro cards are licenced for corporate use, and are much more expensive than their GeForce cards. Legally corporations/academic institutions aren't allowed to use GeForce cards, so they are forced to buy Quadro cards. If it's a personal PC you should definitely go with GeForce (or AMD)!
- alexmr2's points about CPU generation and cpubenchmark are spot on! Worth keeping in mind that sometimes higher benchmarks are because of multithreading, whereas for some applications single core speed will be more important (I'm not sure to what extent BetAngel can make use of multithreading)
- RAM/GPU can be easily upgraded (just open up and insert and click), whereas CPU is much harder (you generally need thermal paste to attach a fan). So if you're buying a PC to last, you can plan to upgrade RAM in future but you'll probably stick with your CPU. Some RAM manufacturers like Crucial even have a simple form on their website to figure out which RAM you can buy for your PC
- Your persistent storage device (HDD/SSD) choice is really important and underrated. Even with a top spec CPU/RAM/GPU, using a hard disk drive (HDD) rather than a solid state disk (SSD) will mean everything takes a long time to load. Whatever PC you're getting nowadays, make sure your main (boot) disk is an SSD.

Hope that helps!

[Crazyskier]

I've built a few PCs myself and done quite a bit of research in this area. A few things worth noting:
- Nvidia's Quadro cards are licenced for corporate use, and are much more expensive than their GeForce cards. Legally corporations/academic institutions aren't allowed to use GeForce cards, so they are forced to buy Quadro cards. If it's a personal PC you should definitely go with GeForce (or AMD)!
- alexmr2's points about CPU generation and cpubenchmark are spot on! Worth keeping in mind that sometimes higher benchmarks are because of multithreading, whereas for some applications single core speed will be more important (I'm not sure to what extent BetAngel can make use of multithreading)
- RAM/GPU can be easily upgraded (just open up and insert and click), whereas CPU is much harder (you generally need thermal paste to attach a fan). So if you're buying a PC to last, you can plan to upgrade RAM in future but you'll probably stick with your CPU. Some RAM manufacturers like Crucial even have a simple form on their website to figure out which RAM you can buy for your PC
- Your persistent storage device (HDD/SSD) choice is really important and underrated. Even with a top spec CPU/RAM/GPU, using a hard disk drive (HDD) rather than a solid state disk (SSD) will mean everything takes a long time to load. Whatever PC you're getting nowadays, make sure your main (boot) disk is an SSD.

Hope that helps!

Indeed. I forgot to mention that I use a 256GB Solid State Drive as my C: drive, which boots in literally a few seconds, in addition to a 1TB hard drive (D: drive) for storage of large files like hi-res images and video / work content etc.

I can't recommend an SSD highly enough, you won't ever want to go back to a hard drive after using a SSD in terms of speed, on any device.

CS

[Dublin_Flyer]

For a self-build, pcpartpicker.com is a definite one to check. Buying parts that go together on paper perfectly is all good and well, but if the parts arrive and you can't fit the cooler onto the CPU because you bought a bigass Noctua cooler and your RAM is too high for it to sit in, then you're in trouble!
Stock cooler on most CPUs is about the size of a Terrys Chocolate Orange box, Noctua nh-d14 is about the size of a box with sides the size of a cd case (remember those things ) so it'll block any high profile RAM or other peripherals fitting in there depending on the motherboard layout/RAM placement and PCI slots.

That website is good for physical checking if everything fits, skinflint.co.uk is best for price comparison once you find what you want if you're in the UK, the EU version of the same site is geizhals.eu. Be very aware of import taxes if you order from EU and live in UK or vice versa. Same with ordering things from Newegg in the US. I learnt the hard way years ago, RAM I wanted for $98 yessss, import tax and duty and shit €22 nooooo.

If you're not really sure what full system you want/need, you could put a request on the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/buildmeapc/ with your exact specs about monitor requirements on the GPU, memory etc, then just look at the one with most upvotes and size/price that one out.

Then come back here and run it by us and we'll check did those unpaid nerds do their homework properly

[Kai]

+1 to what Dublin_Flyer said, especially about pcpartpicker and the subreddits.

Another good website : https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/

I don't really follow the hardware market but I try to keep my PC high end, this is probably the worst time to build one because of the GPU market collapse, altho it's a far wider issue. I'm still stuck with a GTX 1080Ti without Ray Tracing tech for the foreseeable... Not a humblebrag either, it's actual sadness

It's really bad, people build actual scripts and bots to try and buy a good GPU somewhere, all gets sold asap.

So maybe going with prebuilt is more sensible.

[The Silk Run]

+10 Hearts
Dublin_Flyer on-point, as usual. Ironically, just dealing with RAM issues myself.
Forword / Nice to hear your still contributing, I used to follow all your posts.

[Derek27]

FWIW - i'm of the opinon these days that it's just as economical to split the duties of your laptop across a number of platforms/devices. To this end, I run my laptop plus connect to my VPS on two different logins. VPS' these days are pretty much delivering the same power as a high spec laptop, so it's a no brainer.

I have mine setup with the main laptop screen, plus two 24' monitors either side. the LAPTOP portion is used for standard email/browsing etc, whilst the VPS delivers my betfair activites on one login and my development platform on the other (i also on occassion have 3rd party VPS's that I login to for specific tasks).

If i ever find that I'm running out of *juice*, I can upgrade the package to inculde more RAM and/or double up the cores of the cpu. the entire setup costs just under £20 a month, pretty much in line with a decent laptop's depreciation over 3 years. It honestly depends on what you want to *own* at the end of the 3rd year.

Hi Jim,

What sort of specs (vCores, RAM, SSD) do you need to trade, and is it advisable to get a VPS or a dedicated server?

At the bottom end, they start with as little as 512MB of RAM but you can't even install Windows 10 with that little memory?

[jimibt]

FWIW - i'm of the opinon these days that it's just as economical to split the duties of your laptop across a number of platforms/devices. To this end, I run my laptop plus connect to my VPS on two different logins. VPS' these days are pretty much delivering the same power as a high spec laptop, so it's a no brainer.

I have mine setup with the main laptop screen, plus two 24' monitors either side. the LAPTOP portion is used for standard email/browsing etc, whilst the VPS delivers my betfair activites on one login and my development platform on the other (i also on occassion have 3rd party VPS's that I login to for specific tasks).

If i ever find that I'm running out of *juice*, I can upgrade the package to inculde more RAM and/or double up the cores of the cpu. the entire setup costs just under £20 a month, pretty much in line with a decent laptop's depreciation over 3 years. It honestly depends on what you want to *own* at the end of the 3rd year.

Hi Jim,

What sort of specs (vCores, RAM, SSD) do you need to trade, and is it advisable to get a VPS or a dedicated server?

At the bottom end, they start with as little as 512MB of RAM but you can't even install Windows 10 with that little memory?

this is the provider that i use. have literally no concerns about performance and use the same vps on dual logins to simultaneously use it for development (using .net) as well as running BA and OTHER trading softwae. no glitches and transparent access... the base installation is windows server 2019 (pre installed). you simply install your own kit thereafter.

got no ties with this outfit but have no hesitation in recommending them: https://www.simplyhosting.com/vps

i use the M - SSD 3 package - think my monthly bill is about £17.99 ish