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What advantage does 2.7GHz offer?
- Thread starter hajime
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Depends completely what you do with it.
If you are a "Pro" and every second counts it's worth the money, except for that it won't make that much of a difference, it's slightly faster.
Slightly faster processing speeds, meaning power hungry programs such as handbrake and final cut will finish slightly faster. Unless speed is a top priority, it's not worth it
Now that all of the processors can "turbo boost" to 3+ Ghz clockrates, I feel that the benefits of going for faster processors is minimal to the overwhelming majority of users. The only areas where I'd highly recommend it is if you're doing a lot of video-type work (encoding, editing), 3D rendering, or certain scientific applications. Gaming may benefit, but I don't think that the processor is the bottleneck for most games today.
Well, the posters before me have already answered the question, I just want to make it a bit more clear.
Imagine you are a photo professional and you make your living by processing digital images in Photoshop. A 2.7 CPU will allow you to process a few images more per work day (given that your workflow is flawless), because filter application etc. will be faster. Thus, you will be able to complete your orders quicker and potentially earn more money. Of course, if you only get few orders in the first place, the faster CPU won't save you anything (except maybe a minute or two of free time).
Many people think that buying a faster CPU makes it more "future-proof". Essentially, this is wrong. If an i5 chokes at some future application (that is, it is unable to process the code in a reasonable time frame), so will the fastest i7 - in the end, the performance difference between the two is less then 15%, and thats under maximal throughput. For tasks which do not tax the CPU, there will be no speed difference at all.
Imagine you are a photo professional and you make your living by processing digital images in Photoshop. A 2.7 CPU will allow you to process a few images more per work day (given that your workflow is flawless), because filter application etc. will be faster. Thus, you will be able to complete your orders quicker and potentially earn more money. Of course, if you only get few orders in the first place, the faster CPU won't save you anything (except maybe a minute or two of free time).
Many people think that buying a faster CPU makes it more "future-proof". Essentially, this is wrong. If an i5 chokes at some future application (that is, it is unable to process the code in a reasonable time frame), so will the fastest i7 - in the end, the performance difference between the two is less then 15%, and thats under maximal throughput. For tasks which do not tax the CPU, there will be no speed difference at all.
Honestly, no, it won't allow you to process a few images more per work day - because the rate limiting step isn't the processing, it's the thought process itself. It's really only in tasks where the CPU is running at 100% for a significant length of time where there'll be a noticeable difference, and even that will be slight.
If you've got the money, then sure it's worth it. But if you're on a budget, you'r better off using that money towards a RAM upgrade. 2.6 + 16GB ram (and even 2.3 + 16GB) will have more uses than a 2.7 with 8GB (especially as apps become larger like they always do over time).
This is why I wrote "given that your workflow is flawless", meaning that the person spends more time processing the image rather than setting it up
Besides that, I 100% agree with everything you said.