I'm considering buying and iMac, and there are two processor options;
2.16ghz and 2.33ghz. As the difference in price is quite large (UK £170) I
would like to know if in real-world usage there is any major benefit from
the faster processor? Are there any online resources that give some kind of
speed comparison? I'll be mainly using Photoshop and probably a bit of
video editing too.

This will be my first ever Macintosh, so any help would be appreciated.

In article <ycSdncD3de9QqlDYnZ2dnUVZ8qeknZ2d@giganews.com>,
"Kannon Fodder" <fodder007@britverb.com> wrote:

> I'm considering buying and iMac, and there are two processor options;
> 2.16ghz and 2.33ghz. As the difference in price is quite large (UK £170) I
> would like to know if in real-world usage there is any major benefit from
> the faster processor? Are there any online resources that give some kind of
> speed comparison? I'll be mainly using Photoshop and probably a bit of
> video editing too.
>
> This will be my first ever Macintosh, so any help would be appreciated.

My gut says no. If there's not an architecture difference between the
two systems, 2.16 vs. 2.33 GHz is hardly any different in raw processing
horsepower. However, Apple claims their benchmarks ran MUCH faster on
the 2.33 than the 2.00 GHz machine.

Separate specs are not called out on Apple's website for the 2.16
machine. But in the tech specs, they say the 2.0, 2.16 and 2.33 all
share the same shared L2 cache (4MB) and have a 667 MHz system bus.

If I was a betting man, I'd bet that the 2.16 would run almost
identically to the 2.0 machine in the majority of applications.

If you run Photoshop a lot, the things that you should pay attention to
are system RAM, video RAM and of course a fast, high capacity disk
drive, because those are the main limiting items for what you intend to
do.

"Hugh Gibbons" <hugh_gibbons@dontsendmeemail.net> wrote in message
news:hugh_gibbons-8A8ED6.21523909022007@newsgroups.comcast.net...
> In article <ycSdncD3de9QqlDYnZ2dnUVZ8qeknZ2d@giganews.com>,
> "Kannon Fodder" <fodder007@britverb.com> wrote:
> If you run Photoshop a lot, the things that you should pay attention to
> are system RAM, video RAM and of course a fast, high capacity disk
> drive, because those are the main limiting items for what you intend to
> do.

Thanks for your reply Hugh.