iMac i5 or i7

Hi,

I am about to purchase an iMac and am wondering what differences I would see between the i5 (3.2 ghz) and and i7 (3.4ghz) processor and between the 2gig Vram and 1 gigVram graphics processor bearing in mind that I do a fair amount of Motion work.? From my research so far I would conclude not much in the real world. Does anyone have some experience that would help me. I would put the extra money toward either a thunderbolt raid or SSD.

Cheers

Ian

I7 chips have hyper thread, which gives you an additional 4 simulated cores, so it's sorta like having 8 cores instead of 4. I can't speak for how it runs now, but when FCP X was first released, I had used it on both an i5 2011 iMac and my personal i7 2011 iMac. There was a noticeable improvement of performance on the i7. I would definitely go i7. More VRAM is always good too.

I recommend barefeats.com as a resource. In fact, they tested the current iMacs, both i5 and i7 here, including tests in FCPX and Motion:

barefeats.com/imac12p1.html

It's slightly skewed because the i7 had a LOT more RAM than the i5, but still very useful. Scroll around, they even have a test of the two high end GPU choices.

I don't know how much of a rush you're in, but I assume you know that the iMacs will almost certainly be upgraded to the new Haswell processors later this summer or fall. I'm personally in no rush, and am waiting to compare the top iMac with the new Mac Pro on the performance/price scale.

filmfreak3000 is right.
4th Generation Intel
i5 has maximum 4 of Cores/ 4 of Threads and 4.0 MB Cache
i7 has maximum 4 of Cores/ 8 of Threads and 6.0 MB Cache

I can only compare the top of the line iMac to the 2010 i7 MBP (two cores, four threads), but when I look at the activity monitor, many tasks that saturate all cores on the MBP to close to 100% will only saturate the iMac cores to maybe 30% or so (an observation, not at all scientific).

I'd go with the i7 - I got it and never look back.

Yep, thanks guys, good advise, I think I will go with the i7 and take the standard graphics card GTX 675 (1 gig Vram ).
I appreciate your quick response as we have a tax concession for purchases pre end of financial year and I needed to get my order in.

Ian

With a lot of Motion work, you should opt for the 2GB VRAM. It will future proof your machine since you cannot upgrade it.

FCPX also uses GPU for encoding as do some plugins. I suspect as time goes on, it's going to take even more advantage of the GPU (look at the upcoming MacPro Tube) so I'd recommend the 680MX GPU.