The days of needing to have a giant megalith of a PC just to run notepad are long over. Even so the often quoted recommendations for running the Metatader 4 platform software is a 2 GHz CPU minimum. I’m sure those recommendations are left overs from the days of the supper hot Pentium 4, where speed was measured in clock cycles and not computational performance. A Forex Expert Advisor such as Gomega Xray needs to be on 24 hours a day and practically 7 days a week. You could of course shut it off on Sundays but you’d have to remember to turn it back on before the markets open again for your EA to manage your open positions. So a quiet and energy efficient PC would be the most appropriate assuming it can handle the work load of running the Metatrader 4 platform and any EAs you have running.
Just recently a number of low power PCs have become available based on the new Intel Atom CPU. While computer hardware enthusiasts may tell you that these tiny computers are not powerful enough to do any serious work, I am of the opinion that anything that offers better performance than the first generation Centrino platform, deserves another look.
The Asus EeeBox seemed a good choice to try out this idea and I decided to purchase the EeeBox B202 which consumes less than 30 watts of power in total. Under the hood is the Intel Atom N270, 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a 160GB hard drive. My system came with Windows XP and was pretty much ready to run Metatrader right out of the box. The other nice feature of the is tiny PC is that it can be attached to the back of an LCD screen using the VESA mounting (ever wondered what those screw holes in the back of your LCD screen were?). You can drive up to 2 screens, with a maximum resolution of 2048 by 1536 each. That should be enough for most people. I’m using it with a single screen at 1680 by 1050. It could also be used with the new HD screens which have a resolution of 1920 by 1080.
Firing it up with Gomega Xray
So would the Metatrader 4 platform and Gomega Xray be too much for this tiny energy efficient PC. I installed Gomega Xray and setup the six currency pairs as described in the Quantum manual. Then checked the CPU utilization while the system was actively trading on a demo account.The maximum load as displayed by the windows task manager was 5% and the average is around 2%. So this is definitely a viable system to trade 24 hours a day with on autopilot.
Just to try and stress the system a little, I tried burning a DVD while watching a video file, all with Gomega trading in the background. The system was running at comfortably at 25% CPU usage. While I don’t recommend using your system to do anything other than running your EA, it is good to know there is processing power to spare with this system. As a side note, rapidly moving the mouse around causes CPU usage to spike up to 38%. Clearly Microsoft have done little to optimize their code for such a basic fundamental task.
The installation instructions for Gomega Xray are thorough and easy to follow, arranged in a step by step format. There are also setup videos that walk you through the initial setup and configuration of Gomega, including the recommended settings. This must be one of the easiest install and setup. While there is a some new terminology to deal with such as “Market Pulse”, “X Spread” and “Randomness” indicators, these too are thoroughly explained in the “Under the Hood” video, which is part of the setup guide.
While it is customary to get stuck in and start back testing Expert Advisors first and then forward test. I have opted to let it run on a new demo account and observe it in action. I downloaded Metatrader direct from Metaquotes.net and setup a $5000 demo account with Alpari. I then setup Gomega Xray according to the instalation instructions. This was about 12 hours ago and Xray has so far opened 4 trades on different currency pairs and the current position is a $148 profit. These trades are all still open so a lot could happen before Gomega closes the trades at the either the profit target or the stop loss setting. However it is quite a good start and I’m looking forward to checking the situation in the morning.
Mail this post
Tags: Eeebox, gomega setup, Metatrader 4
Leave a Reply