When Apple announced about the first ever iMac to offer a quad-core processor, the new high-end 27-inch iMacs were the first to use Intel’s Core i5 and Core i7 quad-core processors, but unfortunately they weren’t available during time of the announcement. But finally, the wait was over, and the Core i5 and Core i7 27-inch iMacs have arrived by letting us worth for the waiting.

There consist four standard iMac configurations, three of which have 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processors and were reviewed recently. The fourth standard configuration was a $1999 model that has the same 27-inch screen, 1TB hard drive, and 4GB of RAM as the $1699 27-inch 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo iMac but features a more powerful ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory and Intel’s Core i5 quad-core processor running at 2.66GHz.

The Core i5 has 8MB of L3 which holds share among the processing cores. The Core i5 features deals with a technology Intel calls Turbo Boost. If application isn’t using every available core, then the cores idly shut off, and the active cores speed up. According to the Apple Company, this allows the processor to run up to 20 percent faster under heavy workloads; that translates to 3.2GHz in this iMac.An upgrade option to the Core i5 iMac, which swaps in a 2.8GHz .Core i7 quad-core processor for $200 more. The Core i7 also features Turbo Boost (for speeds of up to 3.46GHz), and it also has Hyper-Threading technology that can present itself to highly threaded applications as having eight virtual cores.

Tests regarding the built-to-order Core i7 iMac (which, other than the processor, has identical specifications as the stock Core i5 iMac) showed even greater performance prowess. With a Speed marking of 6 score of 225, the $2199 Core i7 iMac was nearly 8 percent faster than the Core i5 iMac. The Core i7 was nearly 11 percent faster than the $2499 2.66GHz Quad-Core Mac Pro and 9 percent faster than the 2.26GHz 8-Core Mac Pro, which sellsfor $1100 more. In tests conducted, there were a few tasks which where having eight physical processing cores was beneficial, like our Mathematical Mark and Cinebench CPU tests. Though these are just a few specific tests and users’ real-world mileage will vary.

Fortunately it does show that the fastest iMac can hang around with the Mac Pros. In fact, only if  you need to add internal RAID hard drives and/or extra PCI cards (or hate the hi-shine™ display).It is hard to imagine  about many cases where the Mac Pro workstation makes more sense than the cheaper, faster iMac Core i7 that also includes the best display that Apple produces. By the time we buy a led screen for the Mac pro our children could have 2 imacs of the same price.