Best Hardware

R

Ricardo Duran

If you were to design a machine from scratch and the primary goal was
that Excel could fly, what would the machine's specs be?

Multi-vs-single processor?
Gigabytes of RAM?
Faster spinning HD's?

What do you think?
 
H

Harlan Grove

Ricardo Duran said:
If you were to design a machine from scratch and the primary goal was
that Excel could fly, what would the machine's specs be?

Multi-vs-single processor?
Click to expand...

Excel itself doesn't use multiple processors, so unless you have some OS
that could give systems services processing to one processor and Excel to
another, there'd be no difference. Since single is cheaper, single would be
better.
Gigabytes of RAM?
Click to expand...

Excel won't use all available RAM. And a very good thing it won't! Again,
the real trick is having enough RAM for the OS so it doesn't need to swap.
That depends on EVERYTHING you'd be running.
Faster spinning HD's?
Click to expand...

If there's no swapping, then loading and saving files would be the only
times HD speed would matter.

So the simple answer, aside from the number of processors, is whatever makes
your system 'fly' in general should make Excel 'fly' in particular.
 
N

Niek Otten

OK, Harlan,

But my feeling is we can be a bit more specific: Fast processors, fast
memory and a lot of it, on-board caches, fast disks with high-throughput
controllers all help a lot.
And, depending on what you're doing (but that's true for all items), even
fast video controllers may have an impact, like when you have large tables
with split screens.

--

Kind Regards,

Niek Otten

Microsoft MVP - Excel
 
R

Ricardo Duran

Thanks guys,

If I were to describe my highest use of Excel, it would be that I use
it in conjunction with Access. Access stores all my data (100's of
thousands of records.) From which I use Excel to extract using pivots
then extract from those to build dynamic charts. I've managed to
increase throughput by limiting the the Access data by using queries
(huge reduction of time and I don't have to restart Excel after each
Access extraction). However this is where most of the time is spent.
I update five pivots which all together take about 30 mins to update.
I must save before moving to the next table, otherwise, memory leaks
take up my memory and I get errors and Excel crashes.
 
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