iMac 27: i7 or 780M? Which one for graphic design/video editing

780m is what I'd choose. I'm a video and photo editor and I decided to upgrade the GPU to my budget over everything else and I'm happy with my choice.

rassulophoto said:

My concern I guess is whether the additional VRAM outweighs the hyper-threading of the i7. Both seem to be useful for what I need...but which would be MORE useful? Or do I even need either of them and should I just save money?

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My advice would be to wait a little bit longer, and save up for both the i7 and 780M. This is a rather expensive machine, and I assume you'll be using it more than 2-3 years. These things are non-upgradeable, so don't compromise now and regret it later.

You want both. The 780m is faster than the 775 m in premiere and and after effects but the i7 have a huge advantage on everything you will do and you can multitasks with those applications better.
Going for an i5 or a 2 gb gpu will limit you soon.
nvidia already pushed the 800m series for a 4gb vram as standard ( the 880m have 8 gb) because of growing CUDA application support. i7 can be like 30% faster in multicore rendering compared to an i5, and current i5 are probably slower than 3 years old sandy bridge i7.

The i7 will be FAR more useful than the 780, especially for video editing. Just about all of these programs were first utilized for processors only. That's right: until relatively recently, video editing didn't even bother using the GPU! However, as Intel falters on improved CPUs, these programs are starting to utilize the power of GPUs to increase performance. The new Mac Pro is a perfect example: with two GPUs, one is used pretty much ONLY for rendering.

However, these programs still rely heavily on the CPU. The i7, as you know, is hyper-threaded, allowing for 8 virtual cores. The i5 is not, which means that your quad core is 4 virtual cores. The i7 allows for these programs to be used more efficiently.

The upgrade from the 775 to the 780 is fantastic, but your performance is not as dramatically improved as it will be with the i5 to i7.

VRAM is becoming much more important for some programs, like Blackmagic's Davinci Resolve, but, by and large, your #1 concern should always be the CPU.

I still might agree with others saying to wait for both if you can because the 2GB VRAM might limit the longevity of the machine when these programs start increasing the minimum requirements for VRAM.

Good luck!

I had the same dilemma but I chose both the 780m and the i7.

If you need to do renders a lot you will benefit a LOT from the i7 and hyper-threading.

If I had to chose one for the tasks you mentioned I would go with i7.