iMac i5 or i7 for DP

[waddo]

Soon to upgrade my Mac. From what I have read, the i7 upgrade allows "hyper threading." Does DP7 take advantage of this?

Cheers

Waddo

[mikehalloran]

Soon to upgrade my Mac. From what I have read, the i7 upgrade allows "hyper threading." Does DP7 take advantage of this?

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I wondered this same thing until a few weeks ago when I worked the same project on my 2010 i7 and my buddy's 2011 i5. Certain functions in DP 7.24 are much faster than the 30% number published by Intel and the gaming web sites. I was quite surprised.

The main reason I was curious is that my wife owns an identical i5 but, unlike my 2010, it has Thunderbolt. If the DP speeds were similar, I was going to make a swap. No way I am considering that now.

Spend the extra "dough for the do-re-mi" and get the i7 chip. I can't recommend it highly enough. I added two 8G RAM sticks from OWC to the stock 4G and it seems to be enough for my needs.

I have liked my iMac for DP. I thought it would bog down when DP 8 was released but the opposite is true. 8 makes better use of memory and OS 10.8.2 is pretty stable.

Looking into my crystal ball, I am anticipating more storage needs. If my budget can handle it, I may do a Mac Pro within the year but that 2012 iMac plus some TB drives is also looking really good to me right now.

Frankly, my 2010 is doing the job quite well at the moment.