Hello, excellers =]
This is my first post, and happy to join the vibrant community!
I recently build a 775 socket desktop with modified 771 xeon e5450 cpu. With 16g ddr3 ram and ssd, it cost me about $200, including a $50 motherboard from the age.
Before this, I used an ivy-bridge i5 desktop. Also with ssd, but 8g ram.
I was quite surprised at how the xeon responded to some of the heavy worksheets, despite being almost a decade old.
I started searching around and found various opinions on hardware compatibility. These are some issues I found:
i5 vs i7?
hyperthreading?
64bit vs 32?
Excel type (vba usage, formula, # of rows, etc)
Does enabling all cores option in excel really work?
etc...
I could also see how it would be difficult to test, as to % of excel performance upgrade, based on hardwares.
Still, I would love to hear your opinion on this. If you search around, you may find people who will tell you $300 pc is just as good as $2000 pc for excel, where some will say it is definitely worth $2000 with all the newest hardware, except for gpu unless you are using gpu to process calculations.
So the questions isn't "what is best hardware for x usage of excel"
I would love to hear your personal experience on excel performance based on hardware.
-
My personal understanding is that SSD is a must, and unless you are moving large (100gb) files all the time, sata2 and sata3 wont make much difference. RAM, more the better (even if excel can't utilize all, you probably isn't running just excel). I guess that leaves us CPU (clocks, cores, hyperthreading, generations, etc).
Since I went from formula-based sheets to VBA-maintained sheets, I feel like I am less dependent on the hardware performance, but that may be just my hunch since I never tested.
Thanks in advance for your responses =]
This is my first post, and happy to join the vibrant community!
I recently build a 775 socket desktop with modified 771 xeon e5450 cpu. With 16g ddr3 ram and ssd, it cost me about $200, including a $50 motherboard from the age.
Before this, I used an ivy-bridge i5 desktop. Also with ssd, but 8g ram.
I was quite surprised at how the xeon responded to some of the heavy worksheets, despite being almost a decade old.
I started searching around and found various opinions on hardware compatibility. These are some issues I found:
i5 vs i7?
hyperthreading?
64bit vs 32?
Excel type (vba usage, formula, # of rows, etc)
Does enabling all cores option in excel really work?
etc...
I could also see how it would be difficult to test, as to % of excel performance upgrade, based on hardwares.
Still, I would love to hear your opinion on this. If you search around, you may find people who will tell you $300 pc is just as good as $2000 pc for excel, where some will say it is definitely worth $2000 with all the newest hardware, except for gpu unless you are using gpu to process calculations.
So the questions isn't "what is best hardware for x usage of excel"
I would love to hear your personal experience on excel performance based on hardware.
-
My personal understanding is that SSD is a must, and unless you are moving large (100gb) files all the time, sata2 and sata3 wont make much difference. RAM, more the better (even if excel can't utilize all, you probably isn't running just excel). I guess that leaves us CPU (clocks, cores, hyperthreading, generations, etc).
Since I went from formula-based sheets to VBA-maintained sheets, I feel like I am less dependent on the hardware performance, but that may be just my hunch since I never tested.
Thanks in advance for your responses =]
