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I work for a software company. When we sign new clients, the old software supplier makes a 'dump' of their database that we can then import. However, 99 out of 100 times we manually have to do a lot of things with these dumps to make them compatible with our software.

Since these dumps can be pretty large (the sheet itself can be up to 500mb - 1gb) and contain 100's of thousands or millions of records), we need a really good PC that can handle this well. When we open one dump, it can take up to 30 seconds. When we save some of the changes we've made, it can also take somewhere between 10 - 30 seconds.

FYI, the PC we're doing this on right now has these specs

  • Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 EAGLE OC 12G 2.0
  • AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
  • Crucial P2 1TB M.2 PCIe Gen3 NVMe Internal SSD - Up to 2400MB/s - CT1000P2SSD8
  • Crucial Ballistix BL2K8G36C16U4B 3600 MHz, DDR4, DRAM, Desktop Gaming Memory Kit, 32 GB (8 GB x4), CL16
  • I am not sure about the motherboard, but we need WiFi :)

I basically need a PC with a really good SSD, Processor and RAM. There won't be any gaming, so a really simple or cheap GPU will be just fine.

What are your hardware recommendations?

BTW: not looking for an upgrade. We need a new build anyway.

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    If you're using 32-bit Office/Excel, consider uninstalling it and installing 64-bit Excel instead. Your license likely permits you to install either.
    – Steve Rindsberg
    Dec 7, 2022 at 2:29
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    At some point it is the software/tools themselves that become your bottleneck too. With this much data you might get better performance out of a real DBMS instead of treating Excel like one. A faster CPU can squeeze a few seconds off what Excel is trying to do, but specializing with your own custom scripts to modify the data can achieve way better performance than the CPU upgrade can.
    – Romen
    Dec 8, 2022 at 21:41
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    You definitely need to use a database instead of excel. You can connect to a database in excel via odbc. One of he nice thing with databases is you create views that mimic your internal data structures without actually changing how the data is stored.
    – cybernard
    Dec 12, 2022 at 20:55

2 Answers 2

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Opening a file that large is memory intensive and single core limited.

Depending on active memory not used by cache, you will need at least that much ram. Reboot, then open a sample file and check your memory usage.

So you should look at single core performance of about Geekbench 5 of 1,700 or more. Your CPU ranges from 1,200 to 1,700 depending on GHz.

I regularly use large files like that in Excel for macOS on a MacBook Pro M1 Max Geekbench 5 of 1,780 with 64 GB ram. It’s usable.

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Probably the best upgrade you can get right now is the AMD R9 5900X, since you are probably now CPU bottlenecked. You can keep the current platform so it's cheaper, and all your other stuff still looks good

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