Best CPU for Strategy Tester in MT4

Lino

any cpu clock faster than the one you presently use will be the best one for you!

I'd give you access to my Cray XT5 but...

have fun

I wouldn't say that dual core is worthless. While MT4 cannot manage the cores, the advantage of a dual core cpu is that even at the maximum load, you are only down 50%, and your computer will still be usable for other purposes and wouldn't be frozen. I may add that when I use 2 instances of MT4, I have seen cpu usage of 80%, though don't know how the core separation worked.

I would like to add that I have an Intel Dual Core 2.8 GHz where one core is used with max 10-20% load only when one Strategy Tester is running on my quite complex EA. Calculating one run on M5 for half a year of data on open prices only takes around 4 min.

Having a parameter set with 800 runs on 19 pairs this comes up to 1013 hours run time. So I would wonder if 3.6 GHz would speed that up by 30%. They are quite cheap to get or if other factors should be taken into consideration.

Is the CPU most important part for the speed of a backtest?

Will I get improvement if I add RAM. Now I have only 1 GB with AMD SEMPRON 2800+ processor, or I should think about new PC.