Disclaimer
I’m talking about tons of editing… fast editing.
A computer for tons and tons of editing with fastest speeds possible.
Not a computer that will be used from time to time to edit.
Because if you have other pressing needs for the computer then your decision might differ.
My solution isn’t for the pretiest or the most user friendly… I’m talking effeciency!
Fastest, most powerful machine to run Lightroom or Photoshop. = Saving Time
Winner = Hand built PC for serious editing
If you want the fastest machine possible (at the moment) for picture editing you’ll have to stick with a PC for now.
-Good news is it will be abt half the cost (Roughly $3000 less)
-You’ll either need to set it up yourself
OR – Pay someone a couple hundred to set it up.
Still much cheaper than a Mac by several thousand.
Price has a lot to do with my consideration… so if several thousand for a similar powered machine isn’t a concern… by all means go Mac.
I don’t like store bought PCs
Thing about PCs is that stores sell cheap PCs or sell the good ones too expensive.
(Not an efficient move)
The PCs in stores aren’t that good… companies trying to make a buck on shoddy stuff. Therefore the whole PC system gets a bad rap.
And I must admit Macs are great for people who don’t know much about computers and have no desire to learn. But they just aren’t as fast for the same cost… and the options are way limited in comparison. (Stick with them for laptops)
Get a really great one set up by someone
Like i said just pay some techy friend to set it up…
or I’ll find you a techy friend to set it up for you.
Spend the couple hundred you save by buying hand selected parts and pay someone.
My old PC vs New MacBook Pro
I have a brand new MacBookPro for traveling but it’s way way slower than my PC. (1 yr Old quad core)
But laptops are small and convenient and great for travel. I don’t expect to use it all the time, just travel… that’s what it does best.
Why mac for laptop – macs don’t have a huge price difference when it comes to the higher end. I think it was only a few hundred more than the HP and it was smaller and had better battery life. The mac laptops are great…
BUT… For serious editing – use a desktop with real power
But come on, don’t use a laptop for editing if you do lots.
If you edit just a bit… it’s ok, by all means… get a laptop and plug it into a monitor and use a mouse.
COST
Top of the line PC can be built sub $2k (w/o monitor)
(See details below)
Throw in a dell or a mac 30″ monitor and then you’re loving life, you’ve saved several thousand by going PC why not.
MAC = $5549 (w/o monitor)
8cores 2.6, 2 video cards, 2HDs
(NO FAST HD option like an SSD … at least not from their store… so you’ll need to get one of those somehow and reinstall OS)
So yeah it’s a fast machine I can only imagine, perhaps due for an update… but it’s nice.
They really don’t have a lesser version I would recomend unless get the 4 core instead of the 8 core.
Mac is $3000 dollars more and isn’t technically quite as fast. (Not sure how it compare honestly)
But it is prettier and the Mac/OS is nice for many people.
But let’s face it… you’re using Lightroom and Photoshop not finder or laucher all day long.
Seriously I’ll find someone to build it for you
Specs=
i7 8cores, 12gb ram, SSD fast HD with several 1.5TB HDs, best video card or two for up to 4 monitors, full tower, best MB with tons of toys.
Crazy fast for Lightroom editing.
Add in a 30″ monitor or a couple of regular size ones.
I recomend always having a couple of monitors
Oh and if you play games on the side… You’ve pretty much built the ultimate gaming machine
Yet another reason to get a PC for editing?
Fusion IO is coming out with their incredible new pro-sumer HD and it’s a PC device!
And no longer do you have to spend $3-$10K to buy one!
Do you secretly work for Microsoft? I think you should start these rants with “Hi I’m a PC”.
Yeah that’s the weakness of Mac– they don’t have midrange towers. I sourced the price of the processor used in the quad-core 2.66ghz Mac Pro a couple months ago and the processor alone was $1600! (we’re talking server class Xeon processors here.) This is why your PC is so much cheaper, and certainly that i7 is a lot better performance / value ratio by comparison, though technically the processors in the Mac Pro are more powerful.
(Does photoshop really max out all 8 cores?)
Alas. I used to be like you building my own screaming PC for half the cost of the closest comparable Mac. Built PCs for years. I have to admit that I miss the flexibility of building your own machine– there really is nothing in the middle range for Mac. iMacs and MacBook Pros are underpowered, as you mentioned, and frankly I don’t need a Xeon class processor. Something for about $1k-1.5k with an iCore7 would be perfect for my needs.
@ Scott Smith – Except I’d be a bad rep, because my last computer rant about laptops ended with me owning a Mac.
So I like mac laptops but I wouldn’t really consider editing prolonged time with a laptop.
And like mike said… mac has nothing midrange. (worthy discussing, unless you’re not doing tons of editing in which case those bigscreen all in one thingies could be nice)
I love the freedom and flexibility of building a PC.
Because this setup like mike mentioned isn’t even the most extreme… it’s just the newest tech at the best bang for buck.
And yes Lightroom uses all 8cores and it’s not just every blue moon… it uses it all the time and it comes in handy and it saves time.
What about a good monitor? I love the Dell ones, and the Apple ones are smashing too, but what would you say is the best monitor out there? Looking for opinions…
You have me convinced… When I change computers I will be having one built.
So Scott – when is the review of video cards coming out?
Hey Scott,
I built a PC desktop. I’ve always built my own desktop systems. I’m that techie friend that everybody hired to build their PC’s. However, Abode Lightroom’s import and export actions DID NOT take advantage of extra cores under Windows XP – and the overhead of the Windows XP OS bogged down the Lightroom UI, tremendously. And Vista is 20% slower than XP for photo processing! 3GB of RAM, 2.6 Ghz dual core CPU, and it absolutely crawled.
And then I edited on a 1.6 Ghz iBook with 2GB RAM, and Lightroom was snappy, responsive – dare I say it? FAST by comparison. On paper, those Windows boxes just toast the hell out of the Macs, but in real life, the Macs are clobbering the PCs in actual performance.
I was sold. Lightroom is even faster on my new Core2 Duo MacBook. Oh, and the beast of a computer cost twice as much as my Apple certified refurb MacBook. And I couldn’t take it ANYWHERE. It just had no sense of style whatsoever. How embarrassing!
I take my MacBook everywhere, and everybody is always telling me how pretty it looks.
PC’s suck.
- Eric
Hey Eric that’s cool. But maybe you just weren’t good at building comptuers
haha
I’m kidding… Kinda…
I have both and the new macbook is slow in performance compared to my quadcore. I think there are several things that are important.
You need a good quadcore to really crunch those previews and exports… you have to have more than 4GB of ram to handle large catalogs of pictures and the speed really comes into play with a fast HD.
So perhaps that’s my downfall having a macbookpro with a slower HDD
On the other hand I have the fastest rated HDD in the world on my desktop PC.
Yes… guess which computer looks better. You’re right the macbook.
Guess which one I take on trips… yep the macbook.
Guess which one edits better and faster… and cost half the cost? Sorry… but it’s the truth.
I bet a macpro 4-8core machine could perform on the same level. (Granted it doesn’t have an option to use the fusio IO drive… but with a good SSD drive it could be right there and perhaps better… for 2-3 times the cost though… that’s what I’m saying)
And my hopes are to sell off this machine and get a new i7 machine.
Jarvie,
Next time you import or export, hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and check out your CPU core usage. You’ll get a graphical percent usage chart for each core. On my Pentium D machine (admittedly, a couple years old, which is why it needed replacing), it only ever used one core for batch processing. Luckily, it was a fast core, even by today’s standards.
Also, I had less RAM, and frequently had Lightroom open for several hours. There was a known memory leak on the Windows build of Lightroom through version 2.something-or-other, which bogged things down on the PC considerably – not so on the Mac. I have frequently left it crunching and come back hours later to find it still snappy as ever.
In short, the Mac version still managed to do a lot more with a lot fewer resources – and my PC was running a hardware RAID 5 system that did 110MB/sec read / 100MB/sec writes (no single drive at the time could come anywhere close to that performance), compared to the Mac system with about half that HD throughput.
Maybe that was all due to a Lightroom bug that has since been squashed, but whether that’s true or not, I’m still very happy to be free of Windows. Long live OS X!
- Eric
Thanks for the info. and equipment once again. I doesn’t really help with my big dreaming!
JaG
I just received my custom built Windows 7-64 bit, intel i7 920 processor with an Nvidia 1GB GTS 250 video card and 6GB of RAM. I’ve got another desktop that runs XP and 2 GB of ram and the previews for Lightroom 2.6 are instataneous on the old computer and take forever on the brand new supposedly screaming pc! Any ideas?
So which brand? What kind of stuff should I put in there?
I’m new to this whole PC thing, but my laptop is super slow. Please help!
Thank you!
Danielle
P.S. great article!
I am using Asus Athlon combination for years, & I am fully satified with AMD’s performance. So, in my opinion AMD is much better than Intel in term of performance & long time hold out speed, but for life span Intel has no competitor. My currebt configuration is Asus Crosshair IV Extreme, AMD Phenom II X6 1075 3.39ghz, 16gb DDR3 1666MHZ Ram, ATI Radeon 6990 HD Graphics Card, 1TB Seagate SATA 6.0 HardDisk, Asus 450x BlueRay DVD Writer, CoolerMaster Cabinet.
Software running: Photoshop CS5 Extented Edition, CorelDraw X5, Photoshop Lightroom, UMAX Scanner Software.
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate. One tips: If you are experiencing loud noise, slide out the cover take out CPU HeatSink w Fan, clean it properly, clean the thermal Compound & reapply it. The best Thermal Compound which I use is Arctic Silver 5. Do not put too much.
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