Number crunching (sorry)

[Grant]

I hope you will forgive non-gaming questions but I reckon you are THE best to help. This is for personal use , not work-related.

In the summer I had a pc built to my own specs:

AMD Athlon 64 X” Dual Core 4800 processor
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard
Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO 512 MB DDR2 graphics card
2 x 1GB Kingston KVR400X64 DDR RAM
Enermax Liberty 500wv2.2 psu
Value Antec P180 Super Midi case
The hard-drive was a Western Digital Caviar SE16 SATA 2 but is now a Samsung SP2504C (the reason why is too tortuous)
Running on Windows XP Pro 64.

The components were selected on the basis of good reviews from various sources – magazines, internet.

Via Excel, the majority of work is intensive calculations of prices/figures derived from dde’s from a real-time feed over the internet. One sheet has over a thousand dde’s and takes around 40 seconds to load. I use Excel ’97; Excel 2002/3 doesn’t give better performance.

Another sheet takes the values from this sheet and performs calculations via iteration (there is no formula for this), ie it keeps guessing the solution until it is correct, confirmed by the convergence of an actual value and a theoretical value. There could be up to 600 values to determine but the most so far is 170. The calculation for this is 7 seconds (on my previous pc – 500mhz, less than 512k ram – 90 calculations would take 6 seconds; 260 calculations, 1 minute 40 seconds).

I have 3 separate sheets doing the same thing and I would like to merge them into one but this will have an obvious drag on the calculation time.

Can a RAID be set up using the two hard drives; if so, would this improve the system?

For 2-d applications (calculations) how relevant is the graphics card? 3-d rendering is obviously irrelevant (?).

Is RAM or processor the important factor here?

My knowledge of computers is basic so I’m weary of doing any hardware tweaks for fear of screwing up.

Quite simply, how do I improve or maximise performance of my pc? Change components, tweak software and hardware? I’ll listen to the experts.

Thank you for any advice.

Grant.

[XJnine]

For straight up number crunching like you're doing processor speed is going to be key.

To speed things up about the only thing you could do would be overclock your cpu. I'm not sure how large the dataset is that you're working with so you may have better processing times with a faster core cpu speed and slower memory speeds than going with a slower cpu speed to get your memory faster. If the dataset is large enough to require frequent access to main memory during processing you may want to sacrifice some cpu speed in order to increase your memory speed.

I hope I'm making sense. I'll let someone else fill you in on the details of overclocking since I'm sure someone here has your exact motherboard and they could probably explain in greater detail exactly how to go about it.

[Das Capitolin]

In most systems, the items which most effect the performance are: hard drive, RAM, and CPU, all in that order. However, what you are doing requires less of the hard drive and more of the RAM and CPU. Based on that, it is going to be very dependant on the clock speed of your RAM and then CPU.

I would get the lowest latency RAM at the highest clock speed, along with the fastest CPU you can afford. Normally I would preach about the hard drive being the weakest link, but in your case it won't matter much.

[Kougar]

Grant, while you are running those tasks what does the load on your CPU look like? Are both cores being utilized? You can check this via Windows Task Manager.

I would have said Excel 2003 is better (Not to mention more designed) for multi-core processors as such things didn't really exist back before 2000... I still think Excell 2003 would show a difference, however... I think you would be interested in giving this a read about Excel 2007. ;) Especially if both cores of your CPU are not showing as load-balanced, this should greatly cut down on your calculation times.

Excel 2007 multi-threaded calculation boosts performance (http://blogs.msdn.com/officerocker/archive/2006/08/17/704242.aspx)

[Grant]

Xjnine, Das Capitolin and Kougar,

Thank you for the info. Looks like I need to do more research. I’ve saved and printed your replies so I can use this as good starting point.

Once again, thank you.

Grant.

[Kougar]

You're welcome, just don't forget to look around a little at Office 2007. The multithreaded Excel might actually be worth your while to upgrade to it looks like, assuming 97 or 02/03 isn't already using both cores to their full extent possible. An X2 4800 is already a pretty fast chip as it is.