The Antec Minuet 350 has a the Micro-ATX form factor. Micro-ATX is a smaller version of the ATX standard which is designed to make your case and the system therein lightweight and portable. Using the Micro-ATX standard, the case can house motherboards and power supplies with form factors Micro-ATX and Mini-ITX. The dimensions of the case itself (LxWxH) are 439mm x 319mm x 94mm.
The Antec Minuet 350 has four expansion slots, so there is some room for extra components, which may be a deciding factor when planning on the longevity and build type of a PC system. The case has one 5.25' drive bays, which is enough room for an optical drive but little else, and with just one 3.5' drive bay, there is basically no room at all for expansion. There is also no 2.5' drive bay for a laptop-sized HDD or solid-state drive.
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Made primarily of Steel, the Antec Minuet 350 is built to be strong and well-ventilated. Steel cases are generally fairly cheap and sturdy, but also tend to be quite heavy. Whatever your case's material, it is important to keep a consistent airflow so that heat doesn't build up inside. It is therefore advised that you make use of the available built-in case fans and fan installation sections.
I’m often asked by clients to help them choose a PC to run Excel models, particularly large project finance models that might take several minutes to solve with a macro. Here’s my advice:
Laptop or desktop - almost all of my clients want a laptop, so this piece just looks at laptop options, but as a rough rule of thumb, with a desktop you get about twice the power for half the price, so if you want a really fast PC for Excel, you should consider a separate desktop PC.
CPU - for the actual calculation of a model, this is by far the most important factor, but don’t get sucked in by the clock speed or whether it's an i5 or i7, none of this really matters for Excel, what matters most is the number of cores.
Excel can use multi thread processing very well (for most tasks) and so a quad core i7 with a low clock speed will calculate faster than a dual core i7 with a high clock speed.
Looking at Intel's current range of CPUs, H CPUs are definitely the best for Excel, and some of the newer H chips such as the i7-8750H have 6 cores which is even better. At the time of writing, October 2018, there are only a few laptops available with these chips, but the list is growing. However these CPUs drain the battery very quickly so don't expect to see one in a sleek Dell XPS or Lenovo Carbon. HP's ZBook range is a good example of the type of laptop that uses the H CPU - a very powerful laptop but twice the weight and less than half the battery life of an XPS or Carbon.
![Mini Mini](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126610284/109098845.jpg)
U CPUs are the mainstream laptop CPU and if it's an 8th generation (i7-8xxxU) then it'll be quad core, but 6th or 7th generation U CPUs are dual core, so for power Excel use you'd definitely prefer an 8th generation U chip over a 7th generation one.
G CPUs like the i7-8705G are really interesting as they're actually a combined Intel and AMD chip, with the AMD part of the CPU like a separate graphics card, so they usually run great graphics. They're far less common than the U chips but quad core and great for Excel.
Memory - unless you’re using 64-bit Excel (which is now becoming more common), you’re not really going to notice any benefit from having more than 8Gb of RAM. The latest versions of 32-bit Excel have a limit of 4Gb (up from 2Gb) in 64-bit Windows. So no matter how much memory you have in your laptop, 32-bit Excel can only use a max of 4Gb. While the previous 2Gb limit did cause some memory issues for power users, the new 4Gb limit should be more than adequate for almost all users, but if you are using very large spreadsheets there are two ways to avoid this 4Gb limit:
- Use 64-bit Excel, which essentially has no memory limit; or
- Open each spreadsheet in a separate instance of Excel (press Alt when opening Excel).
Keyboard layout - when I look at a new laptop the first thing I check is the position of the Home, End, PgUp/PgDn, arrow and Ctrl/Shift keys. If they don’t feel comfortable then you’re going to hate using the laptop’s keyboard for Excel.
Also, any laptop that combines the F1-F12 keys with Home, End, PgUp/PgDn is a complete non-starter for Excel. Yes Microsoft, that includes the otherwise-perfect Surface series. The Dell XPS range isn't much better, combining the arrow keys with Home, End, PgUp/PgDn.
Screen size and resolution - although most laptops are usually plugged into a large screen on a desk, there are of course times when you’ll use it away from your desk. If you use it a lot on the road then go for the biggest screen you can. Sure it’ll be heavier, but when you’re stuck in a hotel room at 3am trying to finish your model before the investor meeting 6 hours later, you’ll be glad you’ve got a big screen.
For resolution my simple rule is standard FHD (1920x1080) on a 13' screen (unless you have bionic eyes). On a 14' or 15' screen 3k or 4k can look quite good, but it varies by brand. (The Dell XPS 15 looks amazing in 4k)
Touch screen? - touch screens (on PCs) are one of those innovations that you think are gimmicky when you first get one. Then after a month using it you pick up a non-touch screen and you get really frustrated when touching the screen does nothing. Ok, so I really only touch the screen for web browsing and reading documents as in Excel I find it’s simply quicker and easier to use the keyboard or mouse – but who uses a laptop just for Excel?
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Mac or PC? - we're sometimes asked if we'd recommend a Mac and the answer is a clear no, but that has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with Microsoft. Quite simply, Excel for Mac is inferior to Excel for Windows. Sure, it's fine for basic tasks but anything involving VBA is troublesome on a Mac, so that rules it out for power users.
SDD or HDD - when Excel opens a file it reads the whole file into RAM, so once it’s open you won’t notice any speed difference between an SSD and HDD. But in every other way an SSD is vastly superior and once you’ve used one you’ll never go back to a HDD. In fact, given the failure rate of HDDs, I’m always surprised to still see them used in corporate laptops, although thankfully they're becoming more rare. To compound the risk of drive failure, their higher capacity just encourages users to store all their data on their C drive rather than the network or cloud.
WiFi - it's become the norm for laptops to connect to the network over WiFi rather than via an Ethernet cable, indeed many newer laptops don't have a built-in Ethernet port. As a minimum go for a 2x2 AC WiFi adaptor, but if you can get 3x3 that's even better.
GPU - higher end laptops will often have a dedicated graphics chip – look for an Nvidia or Radeon sticker on the case. However, unlike games, Excel doesn’t significantly benefit from a separate graphics card, so unless budget isn’t an issue or you like playing games in your downtime, don’t bother with one.
So in summary, if speed is your main priority, and you can't justify a desktop, pick the fastest quad (or 6) core chip you can afford, and after that choose the laptop based on how it physically feels to use.