How noticeable is the difference between a 2.6 quad core and 2.7 quadcore

Question

Is the $250.00 extra for the 2.7 quad core worth the money. I edit 12 mp photos

Answer 1

The others are right. The only people who should be ordering the 2.7 are if you do CPU-intensive work all day long, like math or 3D graphics. And not only that but also, if in your work the CPU performance matters much more than the performance of other components. But that is not usually true of photo editing.
When editing photos, having fast enough drives and enough RAM will make more difference in performance than adding 0.1 GHz. I would take the $250, not get the 2.7, and instead put the money toward making sure you have a 7200RPM drive or SSD instead of the base 5400RPM model, and also making sure at least 8GB RAM is on board. That will help make sure disk, RAM, and CPU are all balanced, rather than just getting the fastest CPU.
Klight444 wrote:
I edit 12 mp photos
12MP is at the low end of cameras these days, so it won't stress the machine like editing the 36MP images from the latest Nikon. For 12MP photos, you could probably get away with a CPU less than 2.6GHz. It really depends on what you are doing to those images. If the editing is pretty basic, even low-end Macs are fine for 12MP, really. If you add lots of layers and masks in Photoshop, and work in 16-bits/channel mode, or assemble lots of images into panoramas or HDRs, then a faster CPU might help with 12MP images...but having 8 to 16GB RAM would probably make a bigger difference in performance in those cases.