Which iMac should I get? i5 or i7?

All other things being equal the i7 will be about 20% faster than the i5.

fatboy_nf wrote:

How does that translate in terms of iMovie (smooth scrubbing, 1080p, etc.)?

It will be 20% faster than the i5! Therefore if you had an iMovie that took 10 minutes using the i5 the i7 will take 8 minutes. What part of that didn't you get?

fatboy_nf wrote:

I forgot that the i5 has integrated graphics and the i7 has an nVidia GPU. Does that make a difference?

Yes,

It makes a difference.

Integrated GPU use the physical RAM installed in a Mac for its VRAM.

Meaning some portion of that 16 GBs of RAM will be used for GPU/video processing.

A dedicated GPU has is own RAM ( called Video RAM or VRAM) built into its GPU chip and doesn't steal VRAM from the Mac's primary processing RAM modules.

A dedicated GPU is better than an Integrated one for many video related tasks.

Any video manipulation (effects), other than just splicing bits together, is typically

a major CPU/core hog. Most will use up as many cores as are available

running at full tilt.

With that said, it is all a matter of how patient a person you are. You can gain

a bit more working with an SSD as opposed to to an HDD or an external Tunderbolt

RAID array as well.

most of what a real gpu does is 3d, the whole evolution in video cards for ages have been aimed 80% at gaming 20% at 3d modeling programs like maya, auto cad and the likes.

so photo edit and video edit will not really benefit that much

That has nothing specific to do with the CPU. The 2.9 GHz model has a discrete GPU. Both the i5 and i7 CPUs have the same integrated graphics. The difference for you would only be with software that truly benefits from the discrete GPU or requires it.

The i7 will handle whatever you want to do just be sure you max out the RAM and you should be good to go.

Cheers

Don

I had the same question. I ended up buying i7. Try using educational discount to save some money!

I bought the late 2013 iMac 5k, i paid 250.00 to upgrade to 32gb ram, also i spent 600.00 on 2 OWC 960gb SSD i mounted after removing the fusion drive, i spent 310.00 on the i7 Intel processor from the i5, when i added the i7 with multi threading, it made the iMac perfect and the main key to access full power out of my iMac, now i know they solider all these components into the mac so i7! if you can go with at least the most RAM you can but the i7 is beyond worth it.🙂