Haven't seen this addressed here, as the focus seems to be on gaming, but I'm looking to build a new desktop for handling data-crunching and monte carlo simulations, mostly through Excel. When I built my last desktop, I was willing to spend a bit more to get more power and memory than I needed at the time, and it paid off. Not sure if it will here. My main question is, which is better suited to business-oriented tasks, AMD Ryzen or Intel processors? Most benchmarking is gaming-focused, so I can't really tell which offers better performance for business-oriented apps. Based on price and benchmarks only, I've been leaning towards just getting the Ryzen 3800X, currently priced at only $40 more than the 3700X. Would Intel be a better choice for my uses, and am I ridiculously overspending at $360 for a processor that has all sorts of power that I won't be tapping? Thanks for any insights.
Question Recommendation for best CPU for computation-intensive business apps
- Thread starter PNWSkier
- Start date
You are looking are multi-thread, multi-core CPU with as much cache as you can get. I would put more weight on cache size than on cores/thread count.
You can check with your existing setup: Open Task Manager / Performance monitor, and run your Excel. Check whether all cores are loaded.
You can check with your existing setup: Open Task Manager / Performance monitor, and run your Excel. Check whether all cores are loaded.
dorsai
Splendid
- Nov 23, 2013
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Unless you have an AVX-512 instruction specific app that is designed for Intel cpu's then I would go with Ryzen 3700x or 3900x depending on how many threads the monte carlo sims can use. The 3800x offers little performance over the 3700x while using more power and running hotter. I'm not at all familiar with the monte carlo sims you're talking about but besides an AVX-512 advantage for Intel the Ryzen will win out most times and likely run cooler as a bonus.
- May 29, 2013
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Are you crazy spening $300+ for a CPU? How much is your time worth? IF your simulations are faster then are you more productive?
The one thing you didn't say is what hardware you have for a baseline.
The other thing you could investigate is renting some CPU time on an AWS instance to see how well your simulations scale. Buying a 16 core CPU does no good if your software can't scale beyond 8 cores.
drea.drechsler
Polypheme
- Oct 16, 2017
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Since your application is Excel I'd suggest not going beyond an 8 core mainstream processor. If the $40 is no problem for you, then go ahead and go with the 3800X. Intel offers nothing beyond higher cost to get into similar performance level.
The excel functions you're using, even in the math add-in, may not utilize even 8 cores/16 threads but you'll be really pleased that you have a smooth functioning system even while a monstrous simulation is in re-calc. Being able to work on the next simulation while the first one is still running is a major productivity boost.
If your spreadsheets are large enough, and it sounds like they must be, you might also benefit from memory. 3600Mhz is a sweet spot and you can get that very easily on a 3800X system with just enabling XMP on a quality 2 DIMM memory kit rated for it. Go 16 GB minimum, 32 GB if you can. But even 64 GB is not really that expensive now.
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- May 18, 2007
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$300 is fine, about as high as I'd recommend going for a general-purpose PC. Beyond that, performance per dollar goes down quite a bit and you do need to make sure you have a use-case for it to make sense.
Thanks for the reply. I guess that's the question...how efficiently or completely does Excel use available CPU cores? Renting some CPU time to see how that goes is a good suggestion..
drea.drechsler
Polypheme
- Oct 16, 2017
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How 'efficiently' it uses multiple cores may be up for debate, but it's been available to Excel for quite a while. Here's an article dating back to 2005:
Multi-threaded calculation in Excel, or “how calculation can become much faster in Excel 12” - Microsoft 365 Blog
One of the things I mentioned in my overview of Excel 12 post in September was that we had done some work to speed up calculation on modern hardware (multi-processor or dual-core chips). I thought I would take a brief break from tables to summarize that work and to see if any readers are...
www.microsoft.com
But one thing to remember, it's not just the 'doing the calculations'. As I suggested earlier: you'll still have your machine available to you even while it's running a simulation.
I worked with a financial analyst who'd created a monstrously huge multiyear pricing model in Excel with monte-carlo simulations to account for uncertainties that could take several minutes to re-calc. He had three screens on his system and he had one model running a simulation on one screen while working on a different scenario with another model on another screen while his third screen had email, notes and everything else. He'd just go from one screen to the next as a model completed, preparing the scenarios his exercise demanded. It was all pretty much seamless, that was a benefit 8 cores/16 threads offered him.
In contrast, my pitiful little Core2 Duo laptop couldn't even OPEN a second Excel model without crying for pity, much less re-calcing one without horrible keyboard lag on the other. I was, however, pretty good with Excel on one screen and my email on a second. Just go get a cup of coffee when I wanted to recalc a scenario.
- May 18, 2007
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I think you are getting the benefits of extra cores and the benefits of extra RAM confused. As long as you have RAM to spare, you can continue loading and running more stuff largely seamlessly by just setting Windows to prioritizing the foreground task. Background stuff will get slower as more stuff gets loaded but other than that, the system just keeps chugging along. 32GB of RAM is how I'm still fine multi-tasking on my i5-3470 and in no hurry to upgrade yet.
Once you run out of RAM and the system starts swapping, performance drops drastically across the board to the point of being marginally usable. That's what forced me to upgrade from my Core2/8GB to i5/32GB. Back then, I contemplated buying 16GB of DDR2 for the Core2 but it cost nearly as much as a CPU+MoBo+16GB DDR3 upgrade so I went for the upgrade instead since I was overdue for an upgrade anyway, would have been crazy to pass on a ~3X performance freebie.
I bet your former boss had way more RAM in his 8-cores workstation than you had in your Core2 laptop.
drea.drechsler
Polypheme
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To be sure, you have to have the memory too. I suggest to him (earlier) 16 G MINIMUM, 32 if at all possible... 64 would be sweet.
But with what my friend was doing, it did him no good to have to go get a cuppa to let his model run. He wanted it processing, not just idling in background, while he prepared the next scenario. Any analyst who's had to work till 11PM every night during a major proposal to prepare pricing scenarios for the morning brief would know how sweet that is.
And yes, I think he had 32 Gb in a Dell engineering WS. I've no idea what his processor was...I'm not even positive it was 8 cores or 4 core/8 thread since he just told me it had 8 CPU's. He wasn't really the nerd, just an amazing excel jockey.
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The laptop I've been using for this is a Xeon E-2176M that has 6 cores and 12 logical processors. It runs the sims fairly quickly, but I want to be able to run it on a desktop. The price of the 3800X just today dropped to $329 and the 3700X to $309 on Amazon, so this seems like a good time to take the plunge on one of them.
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