Better PC made Excel worse

I run 2010 Excel 32 bit, work are trying to get hold of 64 bit for me (running windows 7 64 bit) - hopefully that will help the situation:

I have two PCs

1st PC, i5 3470 3.2GHZ quad core, 8GB ram
2nd PC, Xeon E5-1650 v3 3.5GHZ 12 core,16GB ram

The problem is - Excel runs slower and crashes far more easily on the 2nd PC. The question is... why?

When I open a second file I get "Excel ran out of resources to calculate..." as well as a variety of other error messages

Also we've tried turning off processor cores (set affinity on task manager) as our systems guys suggested that the multi thread calculations would run quicker on fewer processors (?????)

baffled.

Very interesting reading, mixed results

So the 1st PC doesn't even have hyper threading - changing the multi threading options made very little difference, still crashed after 2 or 3 files were open

The 2nd PC does have hyper threading but turning it off made very little if any difference and no matter what settings I changed would not run the same sheets that the 1st PC would

It sounds like it's RAM related, I think 32bit Excel only allows something like 2GB of RAM to be used? Not sure what 64 bit does but I gather it's better.

haha that should cover it!

Interestingly I did very briefly try 2013 32 bit and it didn't help the situation.