i5 vs i7 for Photoshop

[M_Six]

Hi Folks,

I'm looking to lighten my load when traveling, so I'm considering a 13" MBP that the uni bookstore has on sale. It's non-Retina and upgradeable (which I can do). It has an i5 processor and that's my concern. All else being equal (RAM, SSD, etc), will I see a big performance hit when using Photoshop on an i5 machine as opposed to an i7 machine?

My current laptop is a 15" MBP with a 512GB SSD and an i7 quad core with 16GB RAM. I'm quite happy with its performance. It will remain my primary home use machine. The 13" one will be my road warrior. I can order a 13" MBP with an i7, but that jacks the price up and I'd rather not do that if it won't affect PS performance much.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

The latest 13" MBP with the i5 gets scores of 2502 and 5906 or single and multi-core respectively. The i7 version generates 2975 and 6091 respectively.

Since both the i5 and the i7 are two cores here, you are seeing the difference largely on the fact that the i5 is sitting at 2.5 GHz and the i7 is at 2.9 Ghz..

You don't say how fast your current 15" is, but assuming it's the i7 2.3 GHz, the numbers are 2662 and 10151. So the the 4 cores make a huge difference on the multi-core here. So performance wise, the 13" is nearly half as slow as the 15", but between the i5 13" and i7 13" you won't see much to warrant a higher price for the i7..

 

[M_Six]

Yeah, that's what I figured. And as I said, this won't be my primary image processing machine, just a travel rig. Better to spend the bucks on RAM and SSD than on the processor.

Thanks, Ashwin.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Yup, the higher RAM and SSD will give you a better bang for your buck than the CPU upgrade..