There are various things you can do to improve performance. Most of them have very little effect unless you increase the processor(CPU) speed. If you increase the clock speed of a specific CPU by 20% then the performance of that computer will increase by 20%. Within the same processor family (AMD Athlon, Intel Pentium 4, Intel Core2, etc.) the speed of the processor will tell you its performance relative to other processors in that family. Now look at our competition and check their Intel Core2 CPU speeds and compare them to ours. We have the fastest line of computers available today. You can see it for yourself. We are an Intel Premier Partner and all our computers come with a full Intel warranty on the processor.

You will replace your computer because it is either too slow or it is broken and not worth fixing. Buying a better computer, such as an F-19 vs. an F-11, will get you a longer service life because the faster speeds of the CPU and the better components will combine to delay its day of replacement.

If you use tick charts and you have indicators applied to the tick charts, then you need to look at getting the fastest computer you can afford. Tick charts with indicators will drive up CPU usage to high levels when the market is experiencing a heavy volume of trading.

If your charts are all time based (minute, hourly, daily, weekly) and you use standard indicators then an F-11 or F-18 will work fine. If you use custom indicators then you will probably need to move up to a faster model.

Dual core or Quad core?

Trading software will not use more than 2 CPU cores; so a quad core will not run your charts faster. It is better to have two fast cores rather than four slower cores in most cases. Buying an F-19 (3.41GHz) dual core saves you more than $200 over an F-11 with a quad core (3GHz) and the faster CPU speeds will do a much better job of keeping up with high volume days.

The F-38X is a specialty model with 8 CPU cores for special situations.