Spec for work PC?

[MOBB]

Looking at getting my colleague a fast PC for spreadsheet work, currently struggling with calcs taking far too long.

Our IT outsourcer has quoted;

- HP Z2 G1i SFF U7 265 32GB 1TB SSD Win 11 PRO

or for 50% more;

- HP Z1 TWR Ultra 9 285 32GB 1TB SSD Win 11 Pro plus a further 32GB DDR5 5600 SODIMM RAM

Is the 9 worth the extra, and if not, is the RAM upgrade worth it?

[Dave.]

Does (I assume) excel use more than one core at a time?

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6423vs6443/In...

I doubt you'd notice much difference between those two....

[simon_harris]

with excel I would have thought the more screen area might be more useful than a small form factor machine, p rocessing wise little difference so I might be inclined to go with system 2 without the additional RAM

[V8RAW]

If their bottleneck is calculation speed, choose a CPU with high clock speed (not just more cores).

[mmm-five]

from another forum said:

Hardware requirements... depends on what part of Excel you are using.

CPU clock speed trumps IPC for small tasks. For some complex tasks, IPC matters, as does number of high speed cores. PQ users should look at the latest and the greatest. Front end formulas are also multi-threaded, but can only be as multi-threaded as the calc chain.

VBA is single threaded, single-core clock speed matters here. It doesn't care how many cores you have.

Memory matters, but modern Excel leverages memory compression quite a bit. My 200MB files take up less than 8 GB of RAM while in use - PQ, formulas, data model PP, etc. So capacity isn't a huge deal. Memory speed matters, but you wont be able to measure 5000MT/s vs 4000MT/s without a dedicated benchmark.

NVME storage speed (pcie3, 4, 5) does not matter if you aren't accessing local files.

That said, my current work laptop is an i9 13th gen intel, with 32GB of RAM. I opted not to go 64GB as my testing did not find active memory usage on my work desktop go past 20GB on my worst Excel files (that model more annoying things). The i9 has a higher single-core clock, and overall clock than the i7 or i5 processors of the same generation, and some tasks are faster than on my desktop Ryzen 9 5950x.

Remember that newer Intel CPUs (like the 275HX) have removed multi-threading, so are just 8-performance and 16-efficiency cores, so any multi-threading gains will now be negated, and AMD laptop CPUs (such as the 16p-core/32-thread) 9955HX) seem to have the better performance per watt and a higher IPC than Intel.

But for either CPU, performance may simply be down to how the worksheet is constructed, and whether there's a lot that can be multi-threaded / offloaded, or whether it's all waiting in the single queue.

[tomsugden]

Make sure they're using a 64 bit version of Excel, that makes a massive difference.

[mikef]

tomsugden said:

Make sure they're using a 64 bit version of Excel, that makes a massive difference.

And make sure they have set the Excel option to use all available CPU cores:

[theboss]

Would be interested to know what you are coming from, if you're having performance problems with big Excel sheets. It should be obvious enough from taskmgr to tell if its CPU-bound on a single or multiple threads. If you're using something obviously old/deficient then any of these modern CPUs will crush it in single or multi-threads workloads. I use a top Xeon workstation SKU from ~6 years ago and either of these CPUs piss all over it on every metric.