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Since Apple released the newest iMacs just under a week ago I’ve been trying to decide which would be the best option. After a bit of indecision I thought, I need the daddy, the top of the line, the i7! This new CPU from Intel is a Quad Core demon. It uses four dedicated Cores, but with the use of HyperThreading can have up to eight virtual Cores. When the software doesn’t call on all four Cores, the processor can turn on Turbo mode. This turns it into a two Core beast, running as high as 3.46GHz. Talk about the best of both worlds.

So with my heart set on the i7 system, I realise there are two stumbling blocks. Firstly, they don’t ship till ‘November’ and secondly, I don’t have enough money yet. Anyway, after sticking the thing in the basket online I was checking on upgrades. With the four DIMM slots you can have up to 16GB of RAM in there, although this will cost you close to £1000 from Crucial UK! So I’m looking online for more info and benchmarks of this i7 CPU and notice it supports triple channel memory. Most of the new mobos shipping only have 3 RAM slots and people are running 6GB in their machines. The new iMac has 4 slots. So what will happen, will Apple enable triple channel? Will it be better to run 6GB in your iMac even though 8GB is the more cost effective method? It’ll be interesting to see once they ship!

UPDATED*

After a bit more digging I’ve found that the iMac i7 is using the i7-8xx platform and will not support triple channel memory. This is kind of good news really, as I’ll now be able to throw 4 x 2GB modules at it for a fairly cost effective 8GB of memory. Here’s a chart showing the various platforms, I’ve highlighted the iMacs.

What’s interesting now is, the table clearly shows the platform is capable of DDR3-1333 RAM. Apple is shipping theirs with DDR3-1067. Will we be able to stick quicker RAM in the i7 iMac? Another question that now remains unanswered!