[jyl]

I think it is time to get a new workstation. Mine is about 3-4 years old. I love it’s stability - it never crashes - but feels kind of slow.

Typical task that makes it feel slow is recalculating an Excel sheet with 50,000 formulas. I have plenty of memory at 64 GB. I think the issue is that my CPU is not fast.

It is a Xeon E-2224, which has a decent clock speed at boost 4.5 GHz but only 4 cores and 4 threads. I think my next workstation will have a Core i9 13900 (24 cores, 32 threads, 5.8 GHz boost), which seems like the fastest desktop processor Intel has right now. Yes, Excel supports multithreading now. I am not sure if I’ll miss the ECC memory but am reading that if I’m not sure, then I don’t need ECC.

So my question is, will I save big money by building my own workstation?

I can get a Lenovo P360 Tower with Core i9 13900, 64 GB DRAM, dual nVidia Quadro T1000 graphics cards, and plenty of storage, for $2600.

Will a self-built workstation be much cheaper?

Alternatively, would you suggest replacing the processor in my current workstation? I’m not sure a Xeon socket can take a Core, and Xeon CPUs are very expensive - retail price for a nice Xeon is $600 and up, and it looks that that still gets way fewer cores and threads than the i9 13900.