Trading Hardware Setup

Posted on April 5, 2008
Tags: Techie, Day Trading, Trading Resources |

I finally went the multi-monitors way and bought some hardware today. I got two 20.1″ Samsung Syncmaster 204B LCDs with UXGA (1600 x 1200) giving a total screen resolution of 3200 x 1200 over a diagonal size of 34.4″, slightly more than the previous screen space I had of 1440 x 900 over 15″ ;-). The monitors are connected to my macbook pro via the ingenious Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition and will soon be mounted to a dual LCD arm attached to the desk. I’m already using it right now and it’s working great both on Win XP and Mac OS X Tiger. I’ll post some pics once it’s all set up nicely. I’ve got a jungle of cables, wires and devices on my desk.

I’ve actually been looking at increasing my screen space for a few weeks now. The selection of IT hardware in Bangkok is quite limited, at least from my geeky-gadget-lover point of view. I traveled all over the city to 5 different malls dedicated to computer stuff and could only find 1 LCD arm with NON-standard mounts (should be VESA) and of course no Matrox cards. I ended up getting the graphics card shipped from the US and the LCD arm purchased and carried over by my gf on her recent business trip to Singapore. The LCD’s find was kind of a fluke, they weren’t on display but the sales girl in IT City in Fortune Mall put some effort and checked the catalog for me (very rare behaviour in Bangkok) and found those 2 monitors were in stock.

The costs:

Matrox Card - US$150 brand new off eBay
LCD Arm - US$160 from Jia Ying Pte Ltd in Sim Lim Square
2 LCDs - US$250 each from Fortune IT Mall
Total - US$810

Now I just need to figure out what to do with all the screen space :-) I’m hoping for a slow Monday trading session to get used to this new setup.