Did i make the right choice?

[youyou]

Hey everyone,
So i just recently sold my 2009 BTO 27" iMac with a i7 2.8Ghz.
It treated me well through the years but was getting a little tired lately.
So i'm somewhat of a nut and always like to have the best config of everything.
I just recently bought a Macbook Pro Retina 15" with 2.6Ghz 16Gb of Ram.
Honestly these computers are solely used for browsing, watching videos, downloading music,email and that's pretty much it.
I often am doing many things at the same time so i still do need some power.
I know that i'm not using half the potential of my Macbook Pro but hey i know when i resell it i'll get most of my money back.
Now here comes my Dilemma.
I didn't want to wait a month to get a BTO iMac 27" and didn't think this time around spending the extra 400$ or so was worth it.
So i went to BB and got the 3.2Ghz top of the line 27" iMac.
Initially i was going to upgrade to the i7 get the Fusion Drive and the upgraded Video Card.
How does one compare the standard config high end iMac 27" to a BTO like i described.
Will i be hugely disappointed?
Will the one i got still blow my 2009 out the water?
One thing to note as well i will be upgrading my Ram to 24GB this week.
Thanks for the input everyone!

 

[Ambulater]

To OP

So if all you are doing is "browsing, watching videos, downloading music, [and] e-mail", then you won't see a difference between the i5 and an i7. There is only 5% difference in clock speed which is imperceptible in real world situations and none of those activities are going to come close to maxing out the i5 anyway. The main difference with the i7 is hyper threading, but none of the activities you mentioned can make use of the hyper threading feature. The main use for hyper threading would be if you were heavily into video editing and did a lot of video encoding.

The 675 video card is way more than adequate for all the tasks you list, plus some. It performs reasonably well for gaming as well. You would really only benefit from the 680MX if you did quite a bit of heavy gaming with GPU intensive graphics.

8GB of RAM is likely adequate for the tasks you describe, but if you find that it's not, it's cheap and easy enough to add some later.

The fusion drive is noticeable as the inclusion of SSD really speeds up initial boot up as well as load times for your most frequently used programs. This is the only upgrade that would likely be of value for you particular uses, but it could be argued that it's not worth the $250 up charge.

All in all, I don't think you will be disappointed. I think you made a pretty good decision for your use scenario.

 

[deconstruct60]

...
Honestly these computers are solely used for browsing, watching videos, downloading music,email and that's pretty much it.
....
So i went to BB and got the 3.2Ghz top of the line 27" iMac.
Initially i was going to upgrade to the i7 get the Fusion Drive and the upgraded Video Card.
How does one compare the standard config high end iMac 27" to a BTO like i described. ...

For those kinds of activities there is no substantive difference.

Will i be hugely disappointed?
Will the one i got still blow my 2009 out the water?

The 2012 top end standard config is

3.2 Quad i5 CPU and Nvidia GT675MX 1GB VRAM GPU max RAM 32GB

vs.

2.8 Quad i7 CPU ( i7 860 ) and AMD HD 4850M 512 MB VRAM GPU max RAM 16GB


the gap on GPUs is huge. The RAM gap is also quite large if ever need that much.

One thing to note as well i will be upgrading my Ram to 24GB this week.

Most likely a fast external drive ( USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt ) would probably do more for you workload than another 16GB of RAM. Dump your music/video onto a different drive than OS/App/User account.

If your web browser is sucking up many GBs of RAM you need to find a better web browser. (It likely has a leak. )