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propower

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 23, 2010
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With the 2-19 iMac 27's - Adding in the benefits of Turbo it looks like there would only be a 100MHz difference between these 3 CPUs even at Full Load? In use for Audio Recording and iMovie to youtube editing how much difference would one see between these?
 
With the 2-19 iMac 27's - Adding in the benefits of Turbo it looks like there would only be a 100MHz difference between these 3 CPUs even at Full Load? In use for Audio Recording and iMovie to youtube editing how much difference would one see between these?

It’s more of a choice between the 3.0GHz or the 3.7GHz...the 3.1GHz is a complete waste of money. The 3.0GHz Core i5 is perfectly competent and fast enough to do either job. I would encourage you to think seriously about getting either the 2TB Fusion Drive or the 512GB SSD. The 1TB Fusion Drive is simply not good enough. The Radeon Pro 570X is plenty fast enough as well. Make sure you get at least 16GB, preferably 32GB of extra DRAM (OWC or Crucial). You can always add USB-C SSDs if you need and drop all storage later on.

The 3.0GHz i5 is a 65w TDP CPU, so it will run cooler than the 3.7GHz is 95w TDP, which runs a bit hotter.
 
But its weirder I think :)
Look at this AI video. The all core turbo of the 3.0 is 3.8GHz sustained. *** oops - this is the i9!! And then look at the power - it appears the 3.0 is an unrestricted CPU that is peaking at over 100W then settling at ~84W (4:22 in the video)--- oops looking for the right video on the i5!!!. I believe the All core turbo of the 3.7 is more like 4.1GHz - giving it an advantage - but nowhere near as big as the Base freq is implying. I saw something similar when I tested the 2017 base and 3.8 i5s. I chose the 3.8 but I bet the 3.4 would have been just as good then... 100% agree on the crap fusion - though for pinching pennies a $250 500G X5 from Samsung isn't a bad idea ... If they all had 256G internal SSDs as the base model it would be SO much better!!!

 
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https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=129937,140643

Not much difference, but pay attention to Maximum Memory Size. I've been told that Audio production engineers love their RAM, but 128 GB might be a bit much.

The 8500 is the slightly more expensive CPU, because it isis bundled with Optane (at least in the retail packaging).

The regular i5-8500 in the ARK says it can go to 128GB of DRAM, but the 8500 bundled w/Optane says 64GB, so I have no idea what is going on. Needless to say, Apple is using the one that can go to 128GB of DRAM. I have no qualms about getting the 3.0GHz iMac at this point, no one should.
 
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