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ventuss

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 9, 2011
372
19
What is the difference btw i5 and i7 other than clock speed?
 
The i7 can hyper-thread, meaning you have four physical cores and two virtual cores per core, thus eight virtual cores, giving your more processing power for applications that can take advantage of that, like HandBrake or other transcoding or calculating software.
The i5 only has four cores and one virtual core per physical core.


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I work with 3d graphics and game engines: UDK, Unity, Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop, and Final Cut X. I ll be gaming too. The iMac is going to be my entertaining center.

I decided to go for 3TB Fusion Drive and 680MX. I don't know if I should go for i7 and 16GB Ram as well.

Do you know any benchmark comparing both i5 and i7 iMacs?
 
i5 and i7 are the EXACT same (of most models, not counting Sandy-Bridge E) except for two things. 1) Hypethreading (HT): This allows two threads to run on the same core, giving you 4 "physical" cores and 4 "virtual" ones, which the computer treats as a total of 8 cores. Now, don't confuse this as having 8 core perf. as a thread is not a core, essentially you'll see that clock-for-clock and cache-to-cache, in heavily threaded apps (most ppl don't use these) a 25-40% increase in performance. 2) Cache, not a as big a deal(still important!), but i7's tend to have more. Granted though, most of the intel processors in iMacs, (not counting BTO) are S versions or low end versions.

tl;dr unless you do heave processing you won't notice a diff.
 
I work with 3d graphics and game engines: UDK, Unity, Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop, and Final Cut X. I ll be gaming too. The iMac is going to be my entertaining center.

I decided to go for 3TB Fusion Drive and 680MX. I don't know if I should go for i7 and 16GB Ram as well.

Do you know any benchmark comparing both i5 and i7 iMacs?

Keep in mind you can't use bootcamp with the 3tb drive.
 

To support Windows, Apple hardware uses a CSM-BIOS. The Windows installer, when booted in BIOS mode, only supports the MBR partition scheme, which is limited to 2.2TB disks. Not partitions, disks.



It would seem eventually Apple will need to update their EFI firmware so Windows can EFI boot instead, in which case Windows will then support GPT. And a huge number of hybrid MBR problems go away as well as the 2.2TB limit.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3827724?start=0&tstart=0


http://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/everything_you_need_to_know_about_3tb_hard _drives.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5446
 
typical, apple put the the i5, as the best value, in such a highly priced AIO
for the price they ask for, they should of given us i7-3960X @ 3.30GHz included in the cost!

:mad:

Well, try to find a better offer on the AIO market.

BTW, that CPU alone is worth 50% of the iMac... You have some very weird ideas about how much things should cost.
 
What is the difference btw i5 and i7 other than clock speed?

As others have said, hyper-threading (one virtual core per physical core, which will speed up select CPU-intensive tasks) and additional cache (2MB).

If you have the extra money to blow and you use your computer for all sorts of random things, I say go for the i7. If you only use your computer for the basics and you don't expect to use it for more than that, go with the i5.
 
I ordered my 27" with i7 but having serious buyer's remorse as I don't think I need it really, despite doing light video editing, photo editing, light gaming and running multiple applications across 2 screens, some of which are large databases.
 
If you ask what is the difference you most probably don't need i7.

Unless you wanna brag about high geekbench scores and such.
 
Does i7 iMac runs hotter and noisier than i5 iMac?

nope, one family i5s and i7s have the same TDP (77W for both in the highest-end 27 iMac and 65W for all other models), so there would be no to very minor difference in noise and temperature (1-2% max).
 
I ordered my 27" with i7 but having serious buyer's remorse as I don't think I need it really, despite doing light video editing, photo editing, light gaming and running multiple applications across 2 screens, some of which are large databases.

$3,000 computer... $200 upgrade. Who cares?
 
If you ask what is the difference you most probably don't need i7.

Unless you wanna brag about high geekbench scores and such.

I am sure I don't need it right now, but I plan on using it for the next 4 or 5 years, and I don't know if I may regret the decision in a couple of months or years.
 
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