Dual Opteron 6128 or i7 990x?

[bknu2009]

Hi everyone, I recently purchased a dual Opteron 6128 system (2ghz, 8 cores each, Tyan S8230GM4NR Motherboard, 8gb DDR3) for the purpose of running Microsoft excel simulations. I am running 64 bit Windows 7 Professional and 64 bit Excel 2010 and my machine (and excel) recognizes all the processors.

The problem is that the simulations are not any faster than a Core2 and the CPU indicator usually only gets to around 13%. Additionally, sometimes the macro will just freeze on the computer, whereas the same macro runs fine on a core2. Given I am fairly inexperienced at this, would I have been better to purchase an Intel i7 990x with a much faster clock speed or is there some settings I need to adjust? If the problem is excel, is there another OS or spreadsheet program that can handle calculations more efficiently? (I tried Ubuntu and open office calc with no success)

Thanks!

 

[Spikesoldier]

13% cpu in task manager would correspond to two of your sixteen physical cores under 100% load.

sounds like excel is having a hard time harnessing the other 14 cores. and that function can only take advantage of two threads.

two options:

1. since you are considering a hardware change: go down to an inexpensive core i3 dual core with a high clock speed to improve performance on two threads (two core).

2. open up seven more instances of excel to take advantage of the extra cores. you can set CPU affinity in task manager for each instance of excel. if this fails, you may consider running VM's to take advantage of the unused cores.