Upgrading from 2007 2.4ghz core 2 duo iMac

[emilb]

Hi,

I'm considering upgrading my rather old iMac, but want to have a better sense of how much performance improvement I might expect if I do so, and am hoping to get some feedback.

I have a fairly specific use case in mind. I am a typical dad with a bunch of family pictures in iPhoto (currently over 40k photos and growing). I use the Faces feature of iPhoto extensively and am getting frustrated by watching iPhoto beachball for 10min+ as it computes candidate faces. I can see through system monitor that both cores are pegged when iPhoto does this, so I think this computation scales with additional cores, and that this is CPU-bound rather than io-bound. So looking at multicore benchmarks like the one at:

http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks

I think that if I get a 3.2ghz i5 iMac I might expect a 4-5x speed up and a 3.5ghz i7 might get me 5-6x speed up, but would appreciate knowing if I'm thinking about this right, and any other suggestions or advice people may have.

Thanks!

 

[dollystereo]

You will see massive speed improvement. Anyway, get the Fusion drive, that is a must have.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Fusion or SSD a must

As Dolly says some sort of SSD wether fusion drive or all SSD option is the best thing you can do.

Your normal HDD is the biggest bottleneck in almost all usage cases. I would reccomend full SSD and external storage as this is a desktop and not moved around, USB 3 and thunderbolt externals are plenty fast enough for files and movies and music storage.

The Quad core i5 will be pretty much perfect for your stated usage and I doubt you use any professional software that will take advantage of the 8 threads in the i7 from what you have said.

So I would say go for the i5 and use the upgrade money on an ssd or fusion drive (the fusion drive has very good reviews but will not top the full SSD experience).