Originally posted by: nomagic
Please excuse my ignorance. I feel ashamed to ask, but my curiosity got me. What kind of finance machine needs to be overclocked so much at the expense of stability?
Isn't it a consensus that for finance machines (or any mission critical machine), stability is far more important than speed?
If serious business is involved, wouldn't you want to rent or buy a super-computer? Even building a computer cluster would be a better choice depending on the application. Why build a enthusiastic machine for finance use?
"Reliable solutions from a trustworthy tech company" <- my 2cents...
I don't know what happened to
jchiumenti on this thread.
I can only say that there are a lot of myths afoot. Fastest machine on the block isn't going to trump the bottlenecks that lay between the keyboard and the market.
I know a daytrader who brought her computer to me, and asked why she needed a 24" monitor (in those days, the only choice was a CRT). And I got more of this myth-spinning about instantaneous trades. She asked me to find out what was wrong with the computer.
I poked around, let it boot up, looked at the Win event-viewer logs, tried to shut it down normally (it wouldn't), poked around some more, and decided the entire operating system and disk had been corrupted. I told her that I just couldn't "fix it" -- that she'd have to reinstall the OS, etc.
Woman got peeved at me. I just sat there. She walked up and simply flipped the main power-switch to turn it off.
I asked her "Do you do that all the time?"
And she said "Sure. Why not?"
People playing zero-sum games in the economy? The Nobel laureates I knew always said "Be a long-run-maximizer."
And no way I'm gonna buy a QX9770 so I can set the VCORE at 1.7V. That's not maximizing anything. Except the hemorrhage of my wallet.