Which method is faster, VLOOKUP or MATCH & INDEX?

I have come up with 2 ways of filling in a table with data from another sheet that gets filled via data connections.
Do you think one of them will be less work for the CPU to process than the other?

Setup: There is 1 column with IDs manually entered, which are the anchors for finding data on the other sheet. The formula's goal is to fill out 4 other columns.

Method 1:
=VLOOKUP(E5,ItemList!D5:L1400,3,FALSE)
One of these filled down for each of the 4 columns

Method 2:
Add a column (F) to find the row number on the other sheet of the matching ID
=MATCH(E5,ItemList!D5:D1400,0)+ROW(ItemList!D5:D1400)-1
And fill the 4 columns out with a reference like this
=INDIRECT("ItemList!E"&F5)


TL;DR - Is 4000 VLOOKUPs faster or slower than 1000 MATCHes + 1000 ROWs + 4000 INDIRECT references?

I would initially guess vlookups are fewer operations, but they're probably heftier. What do you think?

Some of it depends on exactly how the spreadsheet is working. I would guess that the match-indirect combination will, in the long run, be more processor work, mainly because indirect is a volatile function. A volatile function is forced to calculate with each calculate event, whether anything really changed or not. With the VLOOKUP() option, when you change the inputs to one of the vlookup() functions, only that incidence of the function calculates. With the match-indirect combination, when you change the inputs to the match function, not only does that match+indirect combination recalculate, but every one of the 3999 other incidences of the indirect function recalculates.

Anytime you are worried about processor time, you would generally want to avoid any of the volatile functions like indirect or offset.

You might consider using INDEX() instead of INDIRECT().

There is calculation timer code here:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730921.aspx

Run some tests and compare the results.