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I have a 2010 iMac 2.93g i7. My wife has a 2011 iMac 2.7 i5. Both are 27". Mine tests 15% faster on the Geekbench composite.

The common knowledge is that an i7 is 30% faster on floating point processing. I don't know where this figure comes from but it is ubiquitous so I'm betting Intel.

In any case, over the last two weeks, I have been doing a project on an iMac that is identical to my wife's with 16G RAM. At night, I run that same project on my machine. My buddy has DP 7.24 so I've been doing mine in 7.24 also.

Without running any direct comparisons or timing with a watch, these are general impressions only. But I observed each many times.

1. Projects open faster on my machine. 15% maybe, hard to tell but feels right.

2. Certain plugs run much faster on the i7. I have been using the MS decoder a lot. On the i5, I apply it to a 50mb pair of tracks and wait a few minutes for them to process. On the i7, it takes a few seconds.

3. Overall, tasks that require a lot of background processing take a lot less time - far less than the Geekbench or 30% numbers would indicate. The i7 rocks.

4. With the iMac, MacMini and MacBook Pro all available in both i5 and i7 versions, I figured that I ought to share. The performance is easily worth the minor price difference.

Thanks Mike, I just bought the Mac Mini 2.5GHz i5 and just ordered 16G of ram to install. (when it gets here) I came from a 2.0GHz mini Core 2 Dual 2G ram which was doing the job for me well except on large sessions (over 25 audio tracks all with several plugins and several VI's) Now DP8 requires a bit more than 2G of ram and I've found 4G installed in my new machine to be maxing out at times. Far as speed goes I can tell a slight difference from my 2005 mini but nothing to write home about. I'm very excited to see if there will be any performance enhancement after I install 16G of ram. I only hope I don't kick myself later for not jumping up to the i7 when I could have.

Thanks again,

mvh

I'm certain that more RAM will be beneficial. The differences between the i5 and i7 that I noted was in the speed of certain functionality, not the ability to perform tasks. If FPP is not involved in the process, there is no difference between the two chips in the real world.