What's the best Excel 2007 Hardware?

[Frank Vellner]

Hi,
I have to buy a new computer and I'm looking for the fastest solution
for Excel 2007. I'm working every day with Excel and I have to wait
often until the program finish a operation. Mostly I work with
Pivot-Tables based on a big amount of data (50 columns * 500000 rows).
I would like to make Pivot operations faster. (yes, it depends on the
PT-Design ... )

I would like to by a 4 GB / Core2Duo E8500 machine with XP. Does anyone
know, if a Quad Processor can be used by Excel and if it will be faster
than the E8500? I've heart, that Excel 2007 has no limits in using RAM.
If this is true: Will Excel work faster, when I buy a 64 bit Vista
computer with 8 GB RAM?

Thanks a lot for any info!
Frank

 

[Harlan Grove]

I would like to by a 4 GB / Core2Duo E8500 machine with XP. Does anyone
know, if a Quad Processor can be used by Excel and if it will be faster
than the E8500? I've heart, that Excel 2007 has no limits in using RAM.
If this is true: Will Excel work faster, when I buy a 64 bit Vista
computer with 8 GB RAM?

Excel (Office as a whole) only comes in 32-bit versions, so if
anything, it'd be likely to run SLOWER on 64-bit CPUs than 32-bit
CPUs. Maybe other processes would run faster on 64-bit CPUs, but I
doubt you'd derive any advantages from 64-bit CPUs. To oversimplify a
little, 64-bit Windows versions are meant for servers running server
processes, not workstations running applications.

 

[Frank Vellner]

Hi Harlan,

Excel (Office as a whole) only comes in 32-bit versions, so if
anything, it'd be likely to run SLOWER on 64-bit CPUs than 32-bit
CPUs. Maybe other processes would run faster on 64-bit CPUs, but I
doubt you'd derive any advantages from 64-bit CPUs. To oversimplify a
little, 64-bit Windows versions are meant for servers running server
processes, not workstations running applications.

thanks a lot - this information really helps!
Frank

 

[Charles Williams]

The only part of Excel 2007 which has been rewritten to make use of more
than one processor is the calculation engine, so Pivot tables will be
restricted to one processor, but recalculation will mostly be faster.

All the tests done so far with Excel 2007 show that it's memory limits are
in practice very similar to those of Excel 2003.


Charles
__________________________________________________
The Excel Calculation Site
http://www.decisionmodels.com

 

[ShaneDevenshire]

Hi,

Excel supposedly supports as many processors as you want. Excel 2007
supports 2 GB filesizes up from the 1 GB in 2003, however its unclear how
that effects calculation.

Tests on two of my machines showed the a machine with 8 GB RAM and a
dual-quad core ran ~ 10 times faster, than a second machine with 2 GB & dual
core. Both machines performed about 13,000,000 calculations of =RAND() in
Excel 2007. The larger machine runs at 2.8 and the small one at 2.16 Gh.
This is a non-scientific test but it does suggest that more RAM/more Cores do
improve the performance. But to complicate the issue the faster machine is
running under XP, the slower on VISTA Ultimate.

As you can see its hard to compare machine performance.