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Hello everyone, I did some research and I found that I can upgrade my iMac Mid 2010 i5 2.7GHz with i7 870(2.93). Is there any possibility to use Xeon X3470 instead of it? Will motherboard and bios accept it without any issues? For ex. to show processor in “about my mac”? http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/94/Inte… I am not guru of motherboards and cpu’s and thats reason why I am asking.
This is tricky! First you can’t use the Xeon CPU’s in this system. The firmware won’t support it properly. So now lets look at the i5 & i7 CPU’s: intel-core-i5-680intel-core-i7-870 Lets look as some numbers to see what is the differences:
So clearly a physical different is the number of cores from 2 to 4 (Purple) which allows that many threads to run concurrently. But, how many apps are you using that are multithreading? Are you using them mostly? So looking at the numbers (Blue & Orange) we see a bit of flip-flop! Single Core 64 is better on the i5 (due to the higher clocking) but Multi Core 64 we see a big boost over Single Core score. Is the benefit enough given the amount of work and the risks?
