I have the opportunity to buy an iMac at a reasonable price! I'm not sure whether or not to go for the i5 or i7? My main program is Lightroom 3 and a tiny bit of CS5. Presently my Raw images are only 10mb, but in the next year or so I hope to upgrade to a Canon 5dmkII which has 21mp images. Will Lightroom utilise hyper threading? Is it worth spending the extra for "future proofing". Whilst the difference in price is roughly £100 after I have sold some bits, it is still £100! I currently have a 2.66 i7 MBP and don't need the portability anymore.
Why not just get a good external monitor and keyboard setup? That MBPro outclasses the '08 machine I use for photo editing. It amounts to a big paperweight next to my 23 in. Samsung monitor, but it's cheaper than a new iMac. Every time I think I need to upgrade, I open iStat Pro and look at my processor usage during an operation. I never seem to use more that 65% of my Core2Duo. I do need more ram, though. My 2k worth. Dale
I went with a base i5 QC iMac and it is quick. I upped the RAM to 8GB. I have a 1Ds (file sizes vary up to 14MB), and will probably get a 1Ds2 before next spring. After working on my files, they quickly climb to 100MB each (after running actions, some NiK work, etc) and I have many files open at the same time, as well as my iTunes library (that is all music and 110GB), Aperture 3 running with Office 2011 and Ai CS4. No hiccups!
Thats good to know! I have a great setup with my MBP with a nice Dell external and keyboard and trackpad. As I don't need portability and always like more poke I figured it was worth it. Plus with my discount and selling my MBP I won't be spending any money.
You will get some benefit from the hyperthreading- just up to you as to whether it will be 100GBP worth. I noticed when I use LR with my i7 mini server, when rendering previews it does max out all 8 threads- so at least LR is multithreaded enough to utilize the available cores. Obviously as it's hyperthreaded virtual cores and not 4 additional physical cores, it's not going to be 2x the speed. I don't know what the efficiency gain is for hyperthreading, anyone know? Ruahrc