Is i7 worth (speed/money) over i5 for bottleneck: 7,200-rpm HD?

[jackcohn]

Hello,

Regular 7,200-rpm HD seems a bottleneck in the iMac's quad-core system. Will the i7 (2.93GHz) be a noticeable advantage (and worth extra money) over i5 (2.8GHz) when combined with 7,200-rpm HD? Does it raelly matter?

Thanks for your comments.

 

[Hellhammer]

Depends on what you do. As the HD is the biggest bottleneck, betting an SSD would show more improvement than a CPU upgrade

 

[jackcohn]

I want to use it for photo and video editing (some vector graphics occasionally).

Yeah, SSD is a solution, however it is pretty expensive. BTW, I already have 2 (or 3) 10,000-rpm Raptor drives (150GB each). What is better: iMac with SSD or maybe Mac Pro with Raptos' RAID?

 

[Hellhammer]

I want to use it for photo and video editing (some vector graphics occasionally).

Yeah, SSD is a solution, however it is pretty expensive. BTW, I already have 2 (or 3) 10,000-rpm Raptor drives (150GB each). What is better: iMac with SSD or maybe Mac Pro with Raptos' RAID?

Raptors provide different kind of performance. RAIDing them provides faster read and write performance but the real benefit of SSD is its latency which is extremely low. That makes it so fast in general use, you don't have to wait for the HD to spin up. OWC offers aftermarket SSD or eSATA port for iMac, they are cheaper and faster than Apple's offerings

 

[jackcohn]

Thanks for your comments.

Is it true that SSD doesn't really delete files? I heard that even if you delete files from SSD they sill exist just not visible and take he space.

I am affraid I cannot afford an iMac with SSD anyway. So going back to my initial question, is the i7 significantly faster over i5? Noticeable difference? Worth money?

 

[xraydoc]

Thanks for your comments.

Is it true that SSD doesn't really delete files? I heard that even if you delete files from SSD they sill exist just not visible and take he space.

True, but a mechanical/magnetic hard drive is the same way. Delete a file and just the pointer to the file is removed. The data remains on the disk... unless you use a secure delete function which then writes zeros over the file multiple times to mask the data. Same can be done for SSDs, though routinely doing that may actually wear out the flash RAM.

 

[Hellhammer]

Thanks for your comments.

Is it true that SSD doesn't really delete files? I heard that even if you delete files from SSD they sill exist just not visible and take he space.

I am affraid I cannot afford an iMac with SSD anyway. So going back to my initial question, is the i7 significantly faster over i5? Noticeable difference? Worth money?

There are tools that can securely erase SSDs, I think.

For your usage, the i7 should be worth it, especially in video editing if it's something else than iMovie. However, the biggest bang for your buck would be 2009 i7 iMac from refurb store

 

[striker33]

So going back to my initial question, is the i7 significantly faster over i5? Noticeable difference? Worth money?

Depends what your going to be doing. If its HD video editing and rendering etc then the i7 is a lot quicker than the i5 due to the hyper-threading technology. There are various videos on youtube comparing the speeds of the two for such tasks.

 

[jackcohn]

SSD confusing

So... If I can afford a SSD it still seems complicated to me. Fast opening system is not a big deal for me. What I need is a fast editing entire system. What is an SSD's advantage if all my pics and videos must be located on the 7,200-rpm HD (sice there is a lot of them). And even if I import files to a Lightroom's or iMovie/FCP's Library on SSD, the SSD's space will be filled momentarily...