What is the best build to have for MS Excel.

[shophoney]

Hi,

I'm looking to replace my i9 11gen with a new pc 13th gen and 64gb.

What is the best build to get. Dell i9 13ks? Liquid cooled...

Money isn't the issue, but need to fastest I can get within reason.

I run large 100+mb Excel files as a CFO and accounting with other apps all at the same time.

Where should the money go faster cpu, more ram... faster ram? does video card matter?

Thanks

 

[DRSteele]

I can't really help with the hardware question.

But I can tell you that MS changed the calculation engine in Excel 365 a few years ago. I think the stand-alone version 2019 onwards also includes same. It is a considerably faster engine now. So make sure you use up-to-date software, the best being 365, which comes with immensely powerful new functions.

 

[etaf]

have a look at the task manager (assuming windows) and have a look and see where the bottle neck is
CPU - RAM ??

How to use Windows 10 Task Manager to monitor system performance

Task Manager can help you to monitor your Windows 10 computer's performance in real-time, and here we show you how.

www.windowscentral.com

When i looked into this in the past (quite a few years ago now) , for people , we often found that it was more of a memory issue and some software , allowed different % of allocation, photoshop for example

What version of Excel - I believe the 32bit version is limited to 2GB Ram usage , so doesn't matter how much ram you have or CPU - if its a memory dependant task, it will not improve

Also the version of the processor is important - I have seen some I3 out perform I5's
but again this was years ago - when i was looking into all this

I nolonger use windows and just use Mac O SX now -

Are you using cloud storage to access files and run, like sharepoint etc - and network connections can have an effect , Wireless or Cable connectivity and the performance of the server

so a few things to consider , you may also find that changing the use of excel to access speeds things up

I remember again back in the 90's - some huge database excel files with data manipulation using vba and functions - took Hours (sometimes days) to update - I migrated to access and then exported into excel - and the time reduced to under an hour