Dispute about what is the best laptop for Excel's power users :)

hello excel ninjas,

I'm gonna buy a new laptop in the next month or two, and I'm sure that I'm falling under the category of excel's power users, I just opens big excel files all day and wait 10 sec each and I'm getting old doing so.

I really want the best , with a reasonable price.

I know that the processor is specially important and 8th generation of intel's proce. is here, so the I7 comes with a reasonable price,
but the I9 is a monster and its price didn't fell yet , should I wait for the big monster ? or the little monster will do just as perfect ? I know it's a speculation , but someone who have experience and knowledge might help,

gonna buy 16 gb, someone think the 32 will do better ? it's only excel so I don't know.

I don't care about the graphic card, excel can use whatever,

and surely ssd.

anymore suggestions ?

what should I do with the I9 in your opinion , If it's a new excel experience for the power user I want it, if it just mehh.. not so much of a difference well I'll pass cause it is hella pricey

of course - last office , last windows, last updates , last drivers ver are gonna be installed.
I won't use unnecessary softwares.
anti virus and firewall is bitdefender 2019.


thanks for any participator !

If you're using modern Excel (Power Query, Power Pivot) with large datasets then as much RAM as possible will make the biggest difference. SSD also makes a noticeable diffference.

In my opinion no i7/i9 makes little difference. If your primary concern is with Excel performance.
Other than RAM and SSD, there really isn't huge difference in performance gain with processor.
I can comfortably deal with 1mil rows 25 col, data using i5, 16 Gb Ram machine (using data model).

If using PowerBI, along with Python/R or other statistical programming language, and also dealing with large data set...
That's where you start to hit performance issue with less powerful machines (for an instance, transforming large netCDF data set and rendering it to chart(s)).
7th gen i7 is probably the best bet at this point for laptop for balance in performance and price.

I'd recommend something like Dell XPS9560, with upgrade to 32GB ram.

Originally Posted by netanel99

giving benchmark score after timing a giant macro

Proper coding makes all the difference, not the hardware.