iMac i5 vs i7

[ecosse011172]

I'm really struggling to choose which 27" iMac to order to replace my old 1.67 Core Duo mini

How have people found the "real world" difference in day to day usage, is the hyperthreading on the i7s used much at the moment?

Are there any differences in noise levels between the two configurations?

Thanks

 

[TMRaven]

About the most usage I found from hyperthreading was video encoding.

 

[rabbisound]

have both and see very little difference go i5 save some money get applecare and you'l have a great beast for 3 years.

 

[ecosse011172]

have both and see very little difference go i5 save some money get applecare and you'l have a great beast for 3 years.

Thanks mate, just the kind of experience I'm interested in.

WHat about sound levels and sound levels between 1TB and 2TB?

 

[Ca$hflow]

If you need another 1TB of space, then buy an external drive. $275 upgrade from 1TB to 2TB!?!? You can buy an external drive for about $100.

 

[Vantage Point]

This set of Benchmark tests should help. Scroll down to see how different iMac configurations score for different uses. I do still image editing with Photoshop which doesn't use multiple cores so the speed differences are more related to the fasted speed of a core (so the i5 scores lower than 3.33 C2D), but for movie editing the differences for mulitiple cores is significant.

http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm?page=/Benchmarks/iMacSnowBench.html

I just ordered a 27" refurb the other day and saved money with a 3.06 C2D. The next version of photoshop for mac will be 64 bit and will benefit by speed increases with additional RAM which is currently limited to 3GB in the 32-bit version. More RAM will make a much bigger difference for me with a 64-bit version than more cores so this option saved me money which I will put into a 13" MB in another month or two.