CPU for excel 2010 64bit

I haven't seen Excel get benchmarked in something like 10+ years. How long does it take to update you 500MB sheet on your current PC and what is your current PC?

I think one of the Haswell pentiums should easily be capable of this?

4GB RAM sounds reasonable although I'm fairly sure 2GB would do the job.

If your sole purpose is for excel only then an Pentinum and 4 GB Ram will be enough.

Umm... A core 2 duo and above?

Laptops crashing on excel that's news to me, though I rarely use excel.

Are you looking for a laptop to run excel then not a PC?

Excel can use multi threaded since 2007 so the more high speed cores you have the better the performance would be. Any CPU should be able to run Excel but your perception of 'fast enough' may be considerably different to mine.

I personally would go with the best multi-core your budget allows and would be looking possibly at something like Intel's i5 to keep costs down and still a nice quick machine for other tasks.

Your spreadsheets of 500mb and the OS would not stretch a 2GB 32 bit system. How many do you open at a time would be a consideration. A 32bit OS does not have access to ram greater than 3.5GB so 4GB would be a waste. However if your planning on installing a 64GB OS you might as well have 4GB of ram which would be plenty for Excel.

Your Thinkpad T440 crashing I would not put down to the CPU/Ram performance but rather a problematic OS or install of Excel.

You can open your spreadsheets on your Dell Inspiron 7420 i7-3612 @ 2.1 Ghz 8gb RAM 64bit Windows 7 machine and then open Task Manager it will tell you how much ram is in use. Hit your recalc and watch Task Manager to track the resources being used.

Simple speed tip for Excel, disable screen updating when calculating, easy to do if using VBA.

Since that 500+MB of text gets translated into a sparse array of objects and other structures when loaded, the in-memory size is most likely much larger: imagine millions of cells each with their own container object, associated virtual function tables and class variables... that can easily exceed 1GB not counting the data itself or any other state data objects might be holding such as parsed functions (to avoid re-parsing formulas on every update event when the cell formula has not changed) and event triggers. I would not be surprised if Excel needed over 2GB to load one of those and that would explain why OP is referring specifically to 64bits Excel.

I'm guessing the reason why his T440 was crashing while loading one of those is because the T440 only has 4GB RAM and Excel needs more than that to load his spreadsheets without performance getting brutally murdered by swapping.

You pretty much answer it yourself. With usage at 6.15GB with your spreadsheets open you should be looking at 8GB minimum. With regards the CPU faster ones will obviously calc faster. Any calculation Excel requests will put any CPU at 100% for the time it takes to be completed. Therefore the quicker processor will get done sooner.

I think Major has pretty much solved your problem.

If you're looking for CPU suggestions I'd still say the Pentium G3220 is worth a look in - It's a PC Pentium so faster than a laptop one

Go for an I3 or I5 if you want it to be vastly faster than the Pentium/Laptop though.

I'm not an expert on excel but I think going by this chart an AMD FX-6300 would be the best CPU per $$$ for Excel though the FX-8320 isn't too much more expensive than the FX-6300

Based on those screenshots, we can tell that 8GB is just about right for whatever you had loaded on your PC while you were running that spreadsheet and yes, you would get faster completion time with a faster CPU and possibly faster RAM. You can expect 30-40% shorter completion time with an i7-4770 and 50-60% with i7-4930k. Of course, that would mean giving up on the laptop form factor.

To see Excel's own memory usage, you need to go in the Details page and enable memory-related stats display.

As for why Excel is crashing, maybe it just does not like spreadsheets that large. Alternately, it could be that your laptop is overheating during spreadsheet updates, memory gets corrupted and then Excel crashes some point later because of that when it hits the corrupted memory address(es). Running your spreadsheet a few times on a well-cooled desktop setup to see if you can get Excel to crash on it would tell you if your Excel crashes are something specific to your laptop or Excel.

OP's GOOD laptop (the one he pulled the Task Manager shot from) has an i7-3612QM in it so Pentium/i3/i5 would actually be a downgrade.

Funny how people appear to have jumped to the conclusion that his computer had to be an antique to be worried about Excel performance. I did not expect a modern relatively high-end PC/laptop to break much of a sweat on Excel either but people who push Excel possibly to the breaking point do exist.

Ah, I assumed they'd come from the T440 laptop.
That said, I think the chart may be helpful.

You could just get a cheap AMD APU the iGPU would be more than sufficent

I would get the Core i5 CPU. Besides the two extra cores, it has turbo mode as the advantage over Core i3.

His 3612qm is actually a pretty good CPU... The OP will not see real improvements unless he goes for a desktop with an i7 or AMD 8 core.

@James,

I recommend checking your system while calculating by also running something that can read your core speed. Something like CPUID would do. There is a chance that your CPU is being clocked down because of heat. If that is the case, you can literally double your speed by cleaning the laptop, getting a cooling pad, etc... My 3610qm throttles down to 1.2GHz because of heat!

If you are looking for a laptop that will calculate faster than what you are getting now, you will pay A LOT!!! You have a high end consumer laptop. You will need something custom built to get better performance. Your best bet at a budget system would be an AMD FX 8320 build with 16GB of RAM (you can get away with 8GB). Here's a quick build for example at $1100 (you can shave off a few hundred $$$ on some components like a weaker GPU, no SSD, etc...) This will be much faster than any laptop at a similar price.

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2Xg8J
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2Xg8J/by_merchant/
Benchmarks: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2Xg8J/benchmarks/

CPU: AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz 8-Core Processor ($154.99 @ SuperBiiz) - Note Microcenter has this for $99!!!
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($29.98 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($126.98 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($142.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 840 Pro Series 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($114.99 @ Best Buy)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($59.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: PNY GeForce GTX 650 1GB Video Card ($87.99 @ Microcenter)
Case: NZXT Source 210 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($29.99 @ Microcenter)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 750W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($64.99 @ Microcenter)
Optical Drive: Asus DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer ($16.99 @ Newegg)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (OEM) (64-bit) ($84.99 @ NCIX US)
Monitor: Dell S2240M 60Hz 21.5" Monitor ($119.99 @ Microcenter)
Keyboard: Microsoft SIDEWINDER X4 Wired Gaming Keyboard ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Mouse: Gigabyte GM-M6880 Wired Laser Mouse ($9.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $1093.84
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-02-21 02:32 EST-0500)

Basically, yes.

Your "old" i7-3612QM is a 4C8T CPU like the regular desktop i7-3770, just with lower max boost frequency while the i7-4600M is a plain 4C4T like the regular desktop i5-4670.

The new chips runs at a clock speed just under 20% higher but your old chip has HyperThreading which gives it a 30-40% boost in massively threaded tasks so your old laptop should be 10-20% faster than the new model.

As I said and others repeated, the only way you are going to get substantially better performance than your current laptop for a reasonable price is to go with a desktop, possibly all the way to i7-4930k. Otherwise, what you have now is still pretty close to the fastest currently available on the market.