A little disappointed with iMac upgrade

[Buffsteria]

We had a 10,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06Ghz, 14GB RAM. We upgraded to a 12,2 i5 3.1Ghz, 16GB RAM....not seeing quite the bump we expected. Was the upgrade a mistake? We were both thinking Quad Core would be twice as fast as Core 2 Duo.

Used for Photoshop, Maya and Zbrush.

 

[Litany]

Yes, it was a huge mistake. The machine you bought is over a year old and will be updated very soon.

 

[ds82]

We were both thinking Quad Core would be twice as fast as Core 2 Duo.

Double the cores doesn't mean you get twice the speed. Not every task can be optimized to make good use of multiple cpu cores ...

 

[leman]

We had a 10,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06Ghz, 14GB RAM. We upgraded to a 12,2 i5 3.1Ghz, 16GB RAM....not seeing quite the bump we expected. Was the upgrade a mistake? We were both thinking Quad Core would be twice as fast as Core 2 Duo.

Used for Photoshop, Maya and Zbrush.

Well, the new CPU is significantly faster than your old one. I guess your workflows are not that CPU-intensive. For numerical computations, the difference is staggering.

P.S. Increase in cores does not automatically translate in same increase in performance. Actually, it does, but mostly because the cores of the new CPUs are much more effective then old ones.

 

[nagareru]

Is it rendering you are talking about? Because a cpu ram upgrade will only be noticeable there.

 

[DeF46]

We had a 10,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06Ghz, 14GB RAM. We upgraded to a 12,2 i5 3.1Ghz, 16GB RAM....not seeing quite the bump we expected. Was the upgrade a mistake? We were both thinking Quad Core would be twice as fast as Core 2 Duo.

Used for Photoshop, Maya and Zbrush.

CPUs are never a huge upgrade. That was the same impression for me upgrading a PC even after two years.

Right now your best bet would be a SSD, even installing OS X on an external one, judging by most reviews.

 

[hi-there]

Like others have mentioned, if CPU upgrade didn't improve your speed, maybe the SSD will. It will increase your data access by four times plus.

 

[SHates]

Most stuff is IO bound. Moving to an SSD gives a very noticeable boost in "speed".

 

[zerostar]

My Old 2.5 Core 2 Duo "Feels" way faster than my work i7 does simply from an SSD upgrade. I have an OCZ Vertex 2 (older one) in it and its a screamer even without the fastest ATA bus.

 

[Buffsteria]

I've seen some people upgrading their 2010 iMac CPUs to i7 from i5. Will this still work with the 2011?

 

[chevalier433]

I've seen some people upgrading their 2010 iMac CPUs to i7 from i5. Will this still work with the 2011?

Dude your cpu is fine and strong for some years more the problem with your imac is that you work with one disk add an ssd and an esata port if you had 2010 and older and a thundrbold drive if its newer and your machine will fly.

 

[fhall1]

If you run virtual machines you'd notice a difference....you could dedicate 2 cores to the VM and still have 2 for OS X and both would really fly for usual tasks....the old CPU couldn't do that with one core dedicated to each.