I need an honest opinion - iMac i5 or i7?

[Tech198]

Get the iMac Pro i7 for sure..

Gaming you can be ok on an i5, but video editing would see better in this area with an i7. And possible get 16 Gig, as video editing needs hell of lot of memory, particularly if your gonna be doing 4K.

 

[esk]

I think I can give you a very good answer because I have used various i5s and i7s. Currently I own a custom build windows 10 PC with an i7 and an iMac with an i5.

In my opinion an i7 is only worth the money for very specific use cases. And because Apple charges you so much extra for the i7 the proposition gets even worse.

Fact: i7 is faster than the i5. But another fact is that the i5 is already overkill for most tasks. The times you are going to benefit from i7 is very limited.

In most games there's absolutely no fps difference if you are using and i5 or an i7. Some CPU intensive games you're going to benefit from the i7 but not very much.

Games rely much more on the GPU. And some games like the new tomb raider need 16 GBs of RAM.

The only time you're going to benefit from the i7 is when your doing CPU intensive task like exporting a video from Premiere. And it comes down to how often you're doing those intensive tasks.

In my opinion if you're not doing those tasks daily don't get the i7. The other point is if you really care if the export is going to be quicker. The export with the i7 can last for 20 minutes while the i5 needs 30.

I would recommend you to go with the i5 unless you absolutely need the speed bump for cpu intensive tasks or you're exporting 3 videos a day.

 

[MagicWok]

I would recommend you to go with the i5 unless you absolutely need the speed bump for cpu intensive tasks or you're exporting 3 videos a day.

It's the OP choice in the end, and depending on what WWDC throws up it might be a whole different set of decisions.

Primarily for gaming, there isn't much difference between an i5 and an i7 - and I wouldn't advise anyone get an iMac for purely gaming anyway.

But I categorically disagree with you recommending not to get the i7, for the productivity and professional work the OP does, the intended life span (5 years) an i7 makes a lot of sense. Not only is the base clock higher, but so is the turbo boost. Additionally, the work she does will definitely benefit from a hyper-threading processor like the i7 which the i5 is not. 5 year life span for this machine...

There will be tangible real world benefits to both live rendering and export times, which is a big deal when you're making a living:

"While the i5 7600K certainly held it's own in our warp stabilize benchmark, when rendering previews it came in at about 26.2% slower than the i7 7700K and for exporting the difference was even larger at 35.8%."
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...i7-7700K-i5-7600K-Performance-884/#Conclusion

Another comparison the i5 and i7 (sixth gen), around a 50% difference in export times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrOIBiSYbjg​