New laptop

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FrankCastle794
Posts: 18
Joined: Tue Oct 31, 2017 8:36 pm

Hi guys

Im after a new laptop for running BA only (apart from a browser with BF and RUK on)
Is 4gb of RAM enough, the one im looking at also has a 128gb ssd hard drive

Cheers guys
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ShaunWhite
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Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

4gb is enough, more than enough. The size of the SSD is not really an issue.

Just make sure the CPU is the fastest you can afford or it will be running at a high CPU utilisation % all the time and the fan will annoy you. Memory/disks are usually easy to upgrade and pretty cheap (mem £60ish for 8gb), but upgrading the CPU on a laptop isn't straightforward at all.
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Derek27
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Location: UK

Unless you are running memory intensive applications, many tests on machines with 8 or 16GB have found that they don't perform significantly better than with 4GB.

Duel core or quad core microprocessors improve the speed and smoothness of whatever apps you're using.
Wolf1877
Posts: 367
Joined: Fri Sep 08, 2017 10:59 am

I'd certainly go for a larger SSD if its an option as 128GB is on the small side but you can generally upgrade this later if you want. I have a fairly old i5 laptop which was dying on its feet and about to be retired off until I replaced its single internal HDD with an SSD and upgraded memory to 8gb. Basically the SSD is a very fast Solid State Disk drive so anything that reads from or writes to the disk will work much faster. So booting up will be faster and launching software that is on the SSD will be much faster. Basically your windows operating system and all of your program files and any millisecond level speed critical data files would be better off stored on your ssd. These are likely to take up a fair chunk of your 128GB.

Other data like photos and videos or whatever can be stored on your larger capacity traditional HDD that I am assuming your proposed new laptop also has. Manufacturers are basically putting small 128GB SSDs in to keep the costs down though personally I think that spending £100-200 extra on a larger SSD and more memory is money well spent as it will likely prolong the useful life of your system.
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FrankCastle794
Posts: 18
Joined: Tue Oct 31, 2017 8:36 pm

Thats great, thanks for your help fellas.
Hooch
Posts: 23
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2018 3:09 pm

Didnt want to open a new thread about the same subject.
Just wondering is this Laptop good/fast enough to run bet angel and a couple of internet tabs at once??
http://www.pcworld.ie/Product/hp-15bs15 ... 26/396.0.0
Any feedback would be much appreciated.
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SeaHorseRacing
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Joined: Fri May 20, 2016 7:06 pm

I agree with the comments but for me SSD cards are the game changers. 256GB should do the job.
Emmson
Posts: 3363
Joined: Mon Feb 29, 2016 6:47 pm

Hooch wrote:
Sat Mar 10, 2018 1:41 pm
Didnt want to open a new thread about the same subject.
Just wondering is this Laptop good/fast enough to run bet angel and a couple of internet tabs at once??
http://www.pcworld.ie/Product/hp-15bs15 ... 26/396.0.0
Any feedback would be much appreciated.
That has same processor as my Dell and I have no problem running Bet Angel.
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Tuco
Posts: 727
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2009 1:43 pm

I'm also considering a systems upgrade, so any help with the following from Peter (or anyone else in the know) would be much apppreciated:

Earlier this year there was an event I was trading in which I ended up having in excess of two thousand matched bets, and as a result the performance of BA was significantly reduced.

When I thereafter had bets matched, I imagine that the CPU had to re-calculate the exact position for each of the 40+ selections re-calculating all of the two thousand previous bets.

What resources does BA most heavily use? CPU? Cache? Memory? Graphics? Does this change depending on the type of trading you are doing, ie pre in-play or in-play?

If you were setting out to build an ultimate Dell Laptop soley for BA Trading, what spec would you look to build? ie would you choose Xeon over i7? 16/32/64Gb RAM? etc... (I already run twin top spec (but a few years old) Dell Laptops each powering 2 x 24" screens and would wish to retain running at least 4 screens.)

All/any advice in this regard would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance Peter :)
mobius
Posts: 203
Joined: Wed Oct 18, 2017 10:15 am

You'd better be quick - got this at 06.10 this morning - must be CO2 powered or something ;)
Bummer.PNG
used link above (http://www.pcworld.ie/Product/hp-15bs15 ... 26/396.0.0)
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Tuco
Posts: 727
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2009 1:43 pm

Tuco wrote:
Sun Jun 24, 2018 11:10 pm
I'm also considering a systems upgrade, so any help with the following from Peter (or anyone else in the know) would be much apppreciated:

Earlier this year there was an event I was trading in which I ended up having in excess of two thousand matched bets, and as a result the performance of BA was significantly reduced.

When I thereafter had bets matched, I imagine that the CPU had to re-calculate the exact position for each of the 40+ selections re-calculating all of the two thousand previous bets.

What resources does BA most heavily use? CPU? Cache? Memory? Graphics? Does this change depending on the type of trading you are doing, ie pre in-play or in-play?

If you were setting out to build an ultimate Dell Laptop soley for BA Trading, what spec would you look to build? ie would you choose Xeon over i7? 16/32/64Gb RAM? etc... (I already run twin top spec (but a few years old) Dell Laptops each powering 2 x 24" screens and would wish to retain running at least 4 screens.)

All/any advice in this regard would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance Peter :)
...just wondering if Peter or anyone in the BA development team could consider and respond to this request - thanking you in advance :)
spreadbetting
Posts: 3140
Joined: Sun Jan 31, 2010 8:06 pm

Two thousand bets !!!! Jeez.

Not surprised BA slows down with that many bets as the lot would get requested from the API on each request, that's a lot of data in JSON format especially if you're streaming. The loss in performance may well be the program having to retreive the data rather than calculate the pnl. There is an API request listMarketProfitAndLoss that provides the pnl figures direct from Betfair rather than having to calculate it yourself. Might be worth amending the program to call that in these type of situations rather than calculate it itself if it's impacting on performance.
Hobsom
Posts: 34
Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2015 8:01 pm

BA calculations utilise CPU.
Cache, memory, HDD & GPU do not crunch numbers. A GPU may help if there are lots of graphs on multiple screens, but BA isn't exactly rendering in HD :P
An SSD may be faster than a traditional hard drive, but the speed differences wouldn't really be noticed if you're retrieving your data from t'interweb.
A fast broadband service connected via an ethernet cable, rather than wi-fi, is also a good option for speed and reduced 'data lag'.

The more cores that your CPU has the better. The more versions of BA you run simultaneously, the more CPU cores you'll need. At least that's how it looks on my 3 PC's.
My 8 core laptop runs about 10 to 15 times faster than my 2 core desktop with multiple versions of BA. No difference in RAM, GPU or HDD size or speed.

So, as far as BA is concerned, you should aim to obtain the highest number of cores at the highest processor speed that you can for your money.
The more cores you have, the more processor cache you tend to have, which also helps a little with calculation speed too.
So it's all down to the number of cores and the CPU speed combined as far as running BA is concerned.

Hope that helps.

PS. IMHO, two good price v performance laptops are: -
https://www.ebuyer.com/819842-hp-250-g6 ... kx90es-abu
https://www.ebuyer.com/805723-hp-250-g6 ... sy44es-abu
LinusP
Posts: 1871
Joined: Mon Jul 02, 2012 10:45 pm

spreadbetting wrote:
Wed Jul 04, 2018 2:46 pm
Not surprised BA slows down with that many bets as the lot would get requested from the API on each request, that's a lot of data in JSON format especially if you're streaming.
I assume you mean 'not' streaming?

I regularly have close to 1000 orders per market and have no issues from streaming on my programs so I assume it is whatever BA is doing locally, could it be the local pnl calculation function?
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Tuco
Posts: 727
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2009 1:43 pm

Thanks for the input fellas - I was thinking of a couple of much quicker laptops that those HP's shown hobson but take your advice on board and thank you for that. I'm still using a couple of old (but top spec) dual core Dell's hence the reason to get a couple of new ones which are in the region of £3k each.

Hopefully I'll get something from Peter and/or the development team in this regard soon...
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