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Confuzzzed

macrumors 68000
Aug 7, 2011
1,630
0
Liverpool, UK
In summary this article claims the 3.2GHz Core i5 of the top-end 27" iMac to be inferior to the 2.9GHz Core i5 of the entry level version.

The only other difference in the machines being the GPUs.

As someone who is about to receive the 3.2GHz Core i5 iMac, these are not results I wanted to see but perhaps I am not going to tighten the noose just yet. There's lies, damn lies and then there's statistics. I am sure the tests they run have more to do with the HDD than anything else. Perhaps luck of the draw? Mine sports fusion anyway, so hoping it's got a bit more zip
 

ybz90

macrumors 6502a
Jul 10, 2009
609
2
The difference is extremely minor and almost certainly due to the hard drives. Furthermore, these results shouldn't be surprising at all as the two models are nearly identical, one being the 3470 and the other is the i5 3470S, differing in just 0.3GHz. For all intents and purposes, the performance difference between the two is negligible anyway.
 

oldgeezer

macrumors member
Dec 10, 2012
72
0
Maryland
The review attributes the speed difference to the Seagate Barracuda drive vs the Western drive. I'd like to see the same tests with each iMac sporting the same drive - preferably the fusion drive.

You don't have to read between the lines to determine that their testing methodology is for overall speed and not a measure of CPU/GPU performance alone and they state that the Cinebench tests of CPU performance show the higher end processor to be 7% faster.
 

Arman

macrumors regular
Aug 27, 2008
204
1
SoCal
Still, given hard drives are the bottleneck of modern pc, it is a little disheartening to see such a gap in performance between the two drives.
 

eroxx

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 27, 2010
801
1
Does anyone know which HDD the Fusion drive uses as it's HDD "partition"?
 

kflanary

macrumors newbie
Dec 21, 2012
17
0
I have the Seagate drive - I found the serial number for that. But how do you check the cache on the drive? Thanks in advance.
 
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