I'm deciding which iMac 21.5 to buy, which led to this question. The 2.9 is $200 more, but is it worth it?
iPod touch, operating system 4.3.5
According to Geekbench, the 2.7 has a score of 8186, the 2.9 has a score of 9194.
Honestly I would get the 2.7 and put the extra money towards upgrading to a Fusion drive.
Thanks for the quick reply. I'm ignorant--what does the Geekbench score refer to: processing speed? How big a difference would the average person consider noticeable?
CPU speed is really secondary for most current computing. I agree the 2.7 is probably the better buy. The reason the previous poster suggested the Fusion drive is because the bottleneck on current computers is hard disk storage. HD's are very slow, a Fusion drive integrates a SSD and HD which dramatically increases performance on startup, loading apps, files etc. If you want more info on what a Fusion drive does look at Apple's information at:
The vast majority of users will not notice any difference in performance between the 2.7 GHz & 2.9 GHz processors. That probably includes you, but only you know.
If you are into serious gaming or 3D rendering you may perhaps see a very slight difference. The bigger difference however would be in an upgraded graphics controller or VRAM, not the cpu. Ditto regarding an SSD or Fusion drive vs. this slight difference in cpu speeds.
For the $200 difference, I'd put the money into upgrading the graphics processor and/or an SSD or Fusion drive.
How much difference does the 2.9 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 make compared to the 2.7 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5?
