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Choice of Processor (i5 vs i7)

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Falcon80

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 27, 2012
537
173
This is yet another i5 vs i7 discussion but since everyone has different uses cases, I thought it would be good to seek some advice here.

Option 1: i5/512 SSD/8GB RAM
Option 2: i7/256 SSD/8GB RAM

Both option 1 and 2 cost the same. I will be doing custom RAM upgrade in future if I ever need them.

My use cases:

- Mobile app development work using Xcode and Android Studios (this includes native coding and also cross platform like Flutter)
- VMs (Windows and Linux for specific server side coding). Likely I will only be running one VM at a time.

For the installed programs and projects I probably need only 150GB of disk space at the moment. I believe i7 will definitely execute the tasks (code compilation, etc) faster but will the bigger space in option 1 help too in having a faster read/write speed?

I understand that I can extend the space via external SSD but I prefer not to do so because all my projects files are on Dropbox.

Any advice will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
 
throAU said:
If you plan on running VMs from internal storage and can only choose one of the two upgrades, get the larger SSD.

256 GB for VMs is going to be very restricting.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the input. :)
 
Falcon80 said:
Will the relatively small enclosure of the mini limit the potential of i7?
Click to expand...

Shouldn't do too much, and more cores will be more useful.

I'll also clarify my answer above.

If you aren't restricted to the internal storage, and future expansion is a consideration, get the i7.

However I thought your original post was quite clear that this was not a consideration, and the choice was only between i5+internal SSD or i7+no additional storage.

If you are open to expanding storage via external devices (and I think that's probably the better way to go as per above posters), definitely get the i7. But you seemed pretty set against that :D
 
throAU said:
Shouldn't do too much, and more cores will be more useful.

I'll also clarify my answer above.

If you aren't restricted to the internal storage, and future expansion is a consideration, get the i7.

However I thought your original post was quite clear that this was not a consideration, and the choice was only between i5+internal SSD or i7+no additional storage.

If you are open to expanding storage via external devices (and I think that's probably the better way to go as per above posters), definitely get the i7. But you seemed pretty set against that :D
Click to expand...

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply.

I am not giving the internal storage too much of a consideration capacity wise because most of my project files are on the cloud and I am mostly working on 1-2 at the same time so only those I am working on reside locally.

I am just thinking whether i5 + faster SSD (50% faster?) will give me better performance than i7 + slower SSD. I also read that it is better to have higher capacity SSD for longer longevity.
 
Falcon80 said:
I am just thinking whether i5 + faster SSD (50% faster?) will give me better performance than i7 + slower SSD. I also read that it is better to have higher capacity SSD for longer longevity.
Click to expand...

It's one of those things that is a "maybe" but it does depend heavily on what you are doing and also what the virtual machine(s) you plan to run are doing.

What do you plan to do with the virtual machines? What OS, apps in them?

In general, yes speed is faster with a larger SSD and longevity is improved if you can keep some free space.

Personally I think 256 even without virtual machines is small. You can't store VMs in the cloud, they are large files (e.g., 30-60 GB plus most likely for Windows) and need to run locally. This is the main reason I suggested storage over the processor, but that is less important if you run the VMs from external storage.

The CPU may or may not be as important depending on what you do with the machine, including inside the VMs - and how many VMs you plan to run at a time. But if you're limited to storing things internally, the SSD size will be the difference between being able to run a VM or not. The CPU will just limit how fast they will run.

In normal use, SSD speed will make little difference to the VMs. All SSDs are fast and whilst one is faster than the other in benchmarks, in normal use you won't notice it.
 
throAU said:
It's one of those things that is a "maybe" but it does depend heavily on what you are doing and also what the virtual machine(s) you plan to run are doing.

What do you plan to do with the virtual machines? What OS, apps in them?

In general, yes speed is faster with a larger SSD and longevity is improved if you can keep some free space.

Personally I think 256 even without virtual machines is small. You can't store VMs in the cloud, they are large files (e.g., 30-60 GB plus most likely for Windows) and need to run locally. This is the main reason I suggested storage over the processor, but that is less important if you run the VMs from external storage.

The CPU may or may not be as important depending on what you do with the machine, including inside the VMs - and how many VMs you plan to run at a time. But if you're limited to storing things internally, the SSD size will be the difference between being able to run a VM or not. The CPU will just limit how fast they will run.

In normal use, SSD speed will make little difference to the VMs. All SSDs are fast and whilst one is faster than the other in benchmarks, in normal use you won't notice it.
Click to expand...

I don't really use the VM much (less than 5% of total work time) and I will run at most 1 VM at a time. Also probably like what you proposed, I can run them off the external storage. Most of the time, I will be working on Xcode and Android Studios, launching simulator/emulator and finally compiling them for testing on actual devices.
 
I use Android Studio a lot with my i7 mini. I find that AS pushes the CPU for Gradle background builds and the Emulator is a pig as well. I think the i5 would be noticeably worse. You can always add external storage, you can’t beef up the CPU.
 
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LogicalVue said:
I use Android Studio a lot with my i7 mini. I find that AS pushes the CPU for Gradle background builds and the Emulator is a pig as well. I think the i5 would be noticeably worse. You can always add external storage, you can’t beef up the CPU.
Click to expand...

Do you mean with an i7, Android Studio also struggle in Mac mini?
 
No, it doesn’t struggle, but you will see all the CPU cores/threads get used regularly. Seems like the i7 having more would be better than the i5 in that case.
 
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