Computer configuration

Discussion regarding the spreadsheet functionality of Bet Angel.
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rain91
Posts: 112
Joined: Tue Feb 07, 2017 7:11 pm

Hi,
i will a computer build for Betangel Excel bot. What CPU do you recommend?

i use a bit compex vba codes in multiple spreadhseets
the refresh rate is important (maximum 500ms)
and I might run more betangels..

I want my old computer replace (Athlon II X4 CPU), it isnt enough.

Please help me.
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Euler
Posts: 24700
Joined: Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:39 pm
Location: Bet Angel HQ

It generally pays to get as higher a spec PC as possible, but a decent CPU and graphics card is top of the list. Bet Angel can optimise it's performance to your PC, so if you have a good PC it will take advantage of that.
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ShaunWhite
Posts: 9731
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

Avoid the latest greatest chip, they're always masssivly over priced and if we all managed a year ago, then the best chip from a year ago will be enough now.

I run an i7-3770k @3.5GHz with 16GB and an Nvidia GTX950, 2xhd screens and 1xqhd screen, and it never gets over 50% and runs cool and quiet. ie Nothing especially exotic.
rain91
Posts: 112
Joined: Tue Feb 07, 2017 7:11 pm

Thanks ;)
Krystian
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue Jul 05, 2016 6:50 am

I bought new PC in March i paid 1.2 k Dell XPS and i see masive difference. Highly recommended.

I have : Intel Core i7 - 8700 CPU 3.2 RAM 16gb
Wolf1877
Posts: 367
Joined: Fri Sep 08, 2017 10:59 am

The main factors that affect if your PC is fast enough for Bet Angel and your excel VBA code are

(1) your code itself - how efficient is it and can you speed it up? If it runs like a dog then a new PC might not massively improve things. Reduce/remove/minimise excel formula calculations and do calculations as needed in your VBA to improve speed.

(2) Your settings in Bet Angel. You need streaming on and should optimise restrict refresh and the guardian refresh rate for your specific automation. I run more than one instance of Bet Angel with different settings.

(3) RAM on your PC - I'd recommend 8GB as absolute minimum these days.

(4) SSD (Solid State Drive) - I've got a couple of old low powered laptops where the performance was completely transformed by me replacing the legacy Hard Disk with a Solid State Drive. Why mainstream manufacturers like Dell and HP are still selling machines with either legacy mechanical hard drives or pathetically small 240GB SSDs is beyond me. A 500GB SSD should be a the absolute basic entry level hard drive requirement IMO. If you are buying a desktop then by all means it could have an additional big legacy mechanical hard drive to archive data. SSD is an absolute must have as the C: drive IMO. 240GB is probably workable on a new machine but on the low side if you tend to accumulate data or install much other software.

(5) Processor power - all CPU's processor power can be checked on https://www.cpubenchmark.net.

A link for an Athlon II X4 640 CPU is https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... 640&id=171 which is around 3300 though there are some variants of this CPU depending on the last 3 digits if you want a more accurate figure for your machine. Shaun's machine is over 9000. Kristian's machine is a high end brute of 15000. I run intensive Bet Angel excel VBA and a bunch of other processes on a machine around the 4000 mark and get very good speed performance but I am thrashing it to death and I also have a separate more powerful Windows Server. If I was just running Bet Angel and Excel I think 4000 would probably be comfortable for my efficient code.

If you are definitely buying a new PC then you may as well upgrade to a minimum benchmark score of around 8000, a minimum 500 GB SSD (with a bigger 2nd drive if you intend to archive data) and minimum 8GB of RAM. I personally will soon be upgrading to something like Kristian's Desktop PC but that is a way higher spec than really needed for Bet Angel and Excel.
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Dublin_Flyer
Posts: 688
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2012 10:39 am

If you're running lots of BetAngels, make sure you've enough RAM. I've 16GB and can easily run 10 instances without any performance impact.
If you're buying your graphics card separate from your computer, make sure you shop around, there's some huge variances in the prices although not as bad as the start of the year. I'd be very cautious about used/2nd hand graphics cards, they could have been used in a mining rig so running at near 100% load 24/7 for a long time.

www.geizhals.eu is great for price comparison, or the UK version www.skinflint.co.uk

Also if you're building yourself, components4all-ltd on amazon have some good motherboard/CPU/RAM bundles
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Kafkaesque
Posts: 886
Joined: Fri Oct 06, 2017 10:20 am

Wolf1877 wrote:
Mon Aug 13, 2018 11:51 am
The main factors that affect if your PC is fast enough for Bet Angel and your excel VBA code are

(1) your code itself - how efficient is it and can you speed it up? If it runs like a dog then a new PC might not massively improve things. Reduce/remove/minimise excel formula calculations and do calculations as needed in your VBA to improve speed.

(2) Your settings in Bet Angel. You need streaming on and should optimise restrict refresh and the guardian refresh rate for your specific automation. I run more than one instance of Bet Angel with different settings.

(3) RAM on your PC - I'd recommend 8GB as absolute minimum these days.

(4) SSD (Solid State Drive) - I've got a couple of old low powered laptops where the performance was completely transformed by me replacing the legacy Hard Disk with a Solid State Drive. Why mainstream manufacturers like Dell and HP are still selling machines with either legacy mechanical hard drives or pathetically small 240GB SSDs is beyond me. A 500GB SSD should be a the absolute basic entry level hard drive requirement IMO. If you are buying a desktop then by all means it could have an additional big legacy mechanical hard drive to archive data. SSD is an absolute must have as the C: drive IMO. 240GB is probably workable on a new machine but on the low side if you tend to accumulate data or install much other software.

(5) Processor power - all CPU's processor power can be checked on https://www.cpubenchmark.net.

A link for an Athlon II X4 640 CPU is https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... 640&id=171 which is around 3300 though there are some variants of this CPU depending on the last 3 digits if you want a more accurate figure for your machine. Shaun's machine is over 9000. Kristian's machine is a high end brute of 15000. I run intensive Bet Angel excel VBA and a bunch of other processes on a machine around the 4000 mark and get very good speed performance but I am thrashing it to death and I also have a separate more powerful Windows Server. If I was just running Bet Angel and Excel I think 4000 would probably be comfortable for my efficient code.

If you are definitely buying a new PC then you may as well upgrade to a minimum benchmark score of around 8000, a minimum 500 GB SSD (with a bigger 2nd drive if you intend to archive data) and minimum 8GB of RAM. I personally will soon be upgrading to something like Kristian's Desktop PC but that is a way higher spec than really needed for Bet Angel and Excel.
Brilliant info! One thing did catch my eye: You put RAM above CPU as a priority. In a previous, fairly recent, thread a few posters noted CPU and specifically number of cores as key. Any thoughts?

The thread being this one viewtopic.php?f=41&t=15240

Computer specs is such a special field, in that it, to a much higher degree than most fields of knowledge, is the case that you either have the knowledge or you're completely lost in the jungle of specs. As such, I find it would be excellent - as NeroTulip touches upon in the linked thread - if the good people at Bet Angel who has their fingers into the nitty gritty of coding the software could collect the input that's come from many users in, at this point, several threads and kick in their own knowledge of the requirements of the software.

I understand there's no definite answer, but a list of which specs to pay most attention to when buying, in the FAQ section for instance, would make a lot of sense imo. Also for BA, as I'm sure they'd like to retain as many customers as possible by giving them a better experience with the product.
Wolf1877
Posts: 367
Joined: Fri Sep 08, 2017 10:59 am

Kafkaesque wrote:
Tue Aug 14, 2018 11:13 pm
Brilliant info! One thing did catch my eye: You put RAM above CPU as a priority. In a previous, fairly recent, thread a few posters noted CPU and specifically number of cores as key. Any thoughts?

The thread being this one viewtopic.php?f=41&t=15240
Kafkaesque, the points I listed were not in a particular order of importance - except maybe the excel formula and VBA code. Basically a PC just provides an environment with resources to execute Bet Angel, Guardian, Excel plus whatever other things you happen to be running on your PC such as browsers, TV streams, other software, the operating system etc.

You can run a bunch of stuff on a PC efficiently providing the system has enough resources to cope with everything you are asking it to do. If your PC doesnt have enough resources or individual resources are not fast enough to keep up with everything else the operating system tries to cope with it but basically everything is slowed down to the slowest bottleneck point. There is no point in having a super duper 6 lane highway if half a mile down the road 5 lanes are coned off. Everything has to be in balance but it is better to have overcapacity everywhere than under-capacity.

Disk Input/Output is typically one of the slowest processes in computing. So if your processes are reading and writing to a hard disk (maybe even in background) then it slows things down. You can speed things up considerably by having a really fast hard disk namely a Solid State Drive (SSD). I was about to throw my oldish i5 laptop out of the window in a fit of computer rage a couple of years ago until I fitted an SSD. In theory processes can work without any Disk Input/Output but the operating system quite often performs some background disk i/o. A 500GB Crucial SSD is currently around £80 on amazon. Its usually not that difficult to replace a disk drive and there are plenty of small computer maint firms that should be able to handle this.

RAM is the computer memory. All of the processes that you are running on your computer will be using RAM. If you have 4GB of RAM and your processes cumulatively only need 3GB then happy days - 4GB is plenty. If however you have 4GB and your processes cumulatively peak at needing 5GB then that's bad. Your operating system will cope with this by either waiting for RAM to be freed up or by shuffling memory temporarily out of RAM and writing it to hard disk (remember this is slow) then reading it back into memory later - either way this slows things down. This is called "memory thrashing". If you want things to run quickly it is vitally important to have enough RAM. New versions of software tend to get more RAM hungry so its better to have too much. As a rule of thumb I'd say go with 8GB minimum. A lot of systems have 4GB and that might be enough for running a couple of instances of Bet Angel and Excel. Extra memory can be bought and fitted to most existing systems.

Onto processor power. Once software has been loaded into RAM then the processor can execute the code. A faster processor executes code quicker (providing the rest of the system is keeping up!) So if you code is reading/writing to/from disk then it will be slowed down by the slowest point which is disk io. Basically a system with a low power CPU, sufficient RAM and an SSD is very likely to outperform a system with a high power CPU, insufficient RAM and/or a slow mechanical hard disk. Best of all though to have a high power CPU, sufficient RAM and an SSD!

The other factor is how much code is there to execute? This is where efficient code affects things. Some bad code might have 10 times more code to process than some efficiently written code. A low power CPU may therefore be able to execute efficient code faster than a very powerful CPU can execute inefficient code. Another way of looking at this is that a powerful CPU may to some degree compensate for badly written code.
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Kafkaesque
Posts: 886
Joined: Fri Oct 06, 2017 10:20 am

Wolf1877 wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 1:21 am
Kafkaesque wrote:
Tue Aug 14, 2018 11:13 pm
Brilliant info! One thing did catch my eye: You put RAM above CPU as a priority. In a previous, fairly recent, thread a few posters noted CPU and specifically number of cores as key. Any thoughts?

The thread being this one viewtopic.php?f=41&t=15240
Kafkaesque, the points I listed were not in a particular order of importance - except maybe the excel formula and VBA code. Basically a PC just provides an environment with resources to execute Bet Angel, Guardian, Excel plus whatever other things you happen to be running on your PC such as browsers, TV streams, other software, the operating system etc.

You can run a bunch of stuff on a PC efficiently providing the system has enough resources to cope with everything you are asking it to do. If your PC doesnt have enough resources or individual resources are not fast enough to keep up with everything else the operating system tries to cope with it but basically everything is slowed down to the slowest bottleneck point. There is no point in having a super duper 6 lane highway if half a mile down the road 5 lanes are coned off. Everything has to be in balance but it is better to have overcapacity everywhere than under-capacity.

Disk Input/Output is typically one of the slowest processes in computing. So if your processes are reading and writing to a hard disk (maybe even in background) then it slows things down. You can speed things up considerably by having a really fast hard disk namely a Solid State Drive (SSD). I was about to throw my oldish i5 laptop out of the window in a fit of computer rage a couple of years ago until I fitted an SSD. In theory processes can work without any Disk Input/Output but the operating system quite often performs some background disk i/o. A 500GB Crucial SSD is currently around £80 on amazon. Its usually not that difficult to replace a disk drive and there are plenty of small computer maint firms that should be able to handle this.

RAM is the computer memory. All of the processes that you are running on your computer will be using RAM. If you have 4GB of RAM and your processes cumulatively only need 3GB then happy days - 4GB is plenty. If however you have 4GB and your processes cumulatively peak at needing 5GB then that's bad. Your operating system will cope with this by either waiting for RAM to be freed up or by shuffling memory temporarily out of RAM and writing it to hard disk (remember this is slow) then reading it back into memory later - either way this slows things down. This is called "memory thrashing". If you want things to run quickly it is vitally important to have enough RAM. New versions of software tend to get more RAM hungry so its better to have too much. As a rule of thumb I'd say go with 8GB minimum. A lot of systems have 4GB and that might be enough for running a couple of instances of Bet Angel and Excel. Extra memory can be bought and fitted to most existing systems.

Onto processor power. Once software has been loaded into RAM then the processor can execute the code. A faster processor executes code quicker (providing the rest of the system is keeping up!) So if you code is reading/writing to/from disk then it will be slowed down by the slowest point which is disk io. Basically a system with a low power CPU, sufficient RAM and an SSD is very likely to outperform a system with a high power CPU, insufficient RAM and/or a slow mechanical hard disk. Best of all though to have a high power CPU, sufficient RAM and an SSD!

The other factor is how much code is there to execute? This is where efficient code affects things. Some bad code might have 10 times more code to process than some efficiently written code. A low power CPU may therefore be able to execute efficient code faster than a very powerful CPU can execute inefficient code. Another way of looking at this is that a powerful CPU may to some degree compensate for badly written code.
Great stuff, thanks for taking the time! That really did explain, how the specs interact better than anything else, I've come across.
Wolf1877
Posts: 367
Joined: Fri Sep 08, 2017 10:59 am

Kafkaesque wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 2:15 am
Great stuff, thanks for taking the time! That really did explain, how the specs interact better than anything else, I've come across.
Happy if it helped Kafkaesque. I took a look at the other thread. Obviously a very wide variety of different opinions. Ultimately everyone uses Bet Angel differently and uses different stuff in background. At the end of the day there is no absolute right and wrong answer to the generic question of "what spec of machine is needed to run Bet Angel".

Everyone who has customised their Bet Angel Excel worksheets linked to Guardian will have done different stuff. Everyone who has developed BAF automation scripts will have done different stuff. Some will put excel charts in, some like me will have 70+ worksheets and multiple instances of Bet Angel guardian, some will have used lots of complex embedded excel formula in multiple sheets. Some VBA code will give poor performance. Some will be running a lot of other stuff in addition to Bet Angel and Excel.

As to those who said RAM does not matter, they are partly right. Too much RAM doesnt speed things up but too little RAM will most definitely slow things down significantly.

As to those who said SSDs dont help, they might be right for the way they run their machine if their disk IO or background disk io is only minimal once the machine is booted up and running. Machines have disk io cache buffers which helps to speed up low volume disk io performance. SSDs certainly wont slow anything down though. My experience is such that I wouldnt even consider using a machine without an SSD.

Those who say number of cores is important. Maybe. I'm not exactly sure how the PC architecture distributes the load across individual cores. Usually more cores correlates directly with more overall CPU power as can be seen on https://www.cpubenchmark.net. Is it the number of cores or the overall CPU power that delivers the improved performance?
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Dallas
Posts: 22671
Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2015 10:57 pm
Location: Working From Home

Wolf1877 wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 11:29 am

Those who say number of cores is important. Maybe. I'm not exactly sure how the PC architecture distributes the load across individual cores. Usually more cores correlates directly with more overall CPU power as can be seen on https://www.cpubenchmark.net. Is it the number of cores or the overall CPU power that delivers the improved performance?
Generally, for a CPU, you want to try to find the fastest clock speed over most other things but it does come down to how you intend to use your PC.
ie, given the choice of 2 cores at 3.3GHz and 4 cores at 2.7GHz, I'd choose the dual core if only running Bet Angel.

However, if you've also got a web browser running on the PC, and maybe Excel, and e-mail perhaps etc etc, then extra cores can be useful because Windows will allocate the different processes to the least busy core.
Wolf1877
Posts: 367
Joined: Fri Sep 08, 2017 10:59 am

Dallas wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 11:48 am
Generally, for a CPU, you want to try to find the fastest clock speed over most other things but it does come down to how you intend to use your PC.
ie, given the choice of 2 cores at 3.3GHz and 4 cores at 2.7GHz, I'd choose the dual core if only running Bet Angel.

However, if you've also got a web browser running on the PC, and maybe Excel, and e-mail perhaps etc etc, then extra cores can be useful because Windows will allocate the different processes to the least busy core.
Thanks Dallas. Its useful to know about how windows allocates processes to cores. In practice nearly everything is 4 cores these days apart from some high end models with 6 or more.

As regards processing speed I'd still tend to take the CPU thread rating over clock speed. See the image below of some CPU data taken from https://www.cpubenchmark.net for 8th generation intel i7-8700 @ 3.20GHz v 7th generation intel i7-7700 @ 3.60GHz v 8th generation inter i3-8100 @ 3.60GHz.

The single thread speed ratings are as follows. Note the fastest individual thread speed is not the highest clock speed. They would all run Bet Angel great though
i7-8700 @ 3.20GHz - 2628
i7-7700 @ 3.60GHz - 2349
i3-8100 @ 3.60GHz - 2103

NOTE ADDED: I only just noticed that the i7-8700 has a turbo speed of 4.6GHz and the i7-7700 has a turbo speed of 4.2GHz which does seems to fit in with Dallas's theory about GHz being an important factor in processing speed. I'll certainly take further notice of that in future! Thanks Dallas - Peter should give you a pay rise!
CPU-compare.jpg
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arbitrage16
Posts: 532
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2017 7:27 pm

May be highjacking this thread slightly, but hopefully this is relevant for other users. I am looking at a custom build from Punch technology and so far have identified the following machine:

AMD Ryzen 5 1400 3.2 Ghz 4 Core CPU
MSI A320M PRO-VH Plus
Nvidia GTX1050 2GB GPU
16GB DDR4 3000MHz RAM
1TB FireCuda Hybrid-HDD
120GB 2.5" SSD
AMD Wraith Cooler
300W PSU
Gigabyte Wireless AC Bluetooth

I mostly trade in-play, and would appreciate any feedback on the suitability of such a machine. This comes in at the princely sum of £744.76
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BetScalper
Posts: 1139
Joined: Sun Jul 02, 2017 10:47 pm

arbitrage16 wrote:
Wed Aug 15, 2018 5:07 pm
May be highjacking this thread slightly, but hopefully this is relevant for other users. I am looking at a custom build from Punch technology and so far have identified the following machine:

AMD Ryzen 5 1400 3.2 Ghz 4 Core CPU
MSI A320M PRO-VH Plus
Nvidia GTX1050 2GB GPU
16GB DDR4 3000MHz RAM
1TB FireCuda Hybrid-HDD
120GB 2.5" SSD
AMD Wraith Cooler
300W PSU
Gigabyte Wireless AC Bluetooth

I mostly trade in-play, and would appreciate any feedback on the suitability of such a machine. This comes in at the princely sum of £744.76
I can't speak for others but I wouldn't buy anything that had an AMD chip in it. They caused havoc during my AutoCAD days.
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