I need some advice on a Mac purchase. My primary application is running Lightroom 5 where I often take 200-400 shot batches of sports photos that I shoot in raw with a DSL, edit them down to 30-50 shots, and export highest quality jpegs. My 4 yr old i7 2.67GHz PC is due for replacement and I want to switch to Mac after repeated problems with Dell PCs.
I looked through a lot of performance data, and surprisingly the MacMini i7 2.6GHz isn't bad at all. In fact on things like raw conversion to jpegs it is as fast as a MacPro 3.3GHz 6 core. On speedmark 8, the Mac Mini is actually faster than the MacPro. But on other measures like the digilloydmed benchmark the MacPro is twice as fast. These benchmarks are very confusing to me because they test different performance attributes that may or may not be relevant to me and often the configuration (ex. how much DRAM and what kind of storage using SSD or HDD) isn't defined.
My choices assuming I need 16GB DRAM and 3TB of storage with an SSD for the boot drive are:
A) MacMini i7 2.6GHz with 16GB of DRAM and 256K SSD with 3TB external HDD over USB3 or TB (total cost about $1650 including HDD with an EPP discount)
B) 2012/13 Mac Pro Quad 3.2GHz refurbished by Apple upgraded to 16GB DRAM, 256k SSD and 3TB storage for about $2,700. (There are also some new models available on ebay and other sellers that would save about $300-400 of that total.)
C) Wait to see what the Haswell based MacMini's and new MacPros look like.
The MacMini has the obvious limitations that DRAM can't be expanded beyond 16GB for instance if I go to a Nikon 24-36MP camera, and the Intel 4000 graphics aren't that great. However, its not clear to me that graphics performance matters that much to Lightroom. Seems to matter more for photoship and video (I do occassionally build 15-20min slideshows in Proshow Gold.)
This is what I know based on internet search, which lacks any real-world experience, so I'd really appreciate any advice from experienced Mac users!
Dave
I looked through a lot of performance data, and surprisingly the MacMini i7 2.6GHz isn't bad at all. In fact on things like raw conversion to jpegs it is as fast as a MacPro 3.3GHz 6 core. On speedmark 8, the Mac Mini is actually faster than the MacPro. But on other measures like the digilloydmed benchmark the MacPro is twice as fast. These benchmarks are very confusing to me because they test different performance attributes that may or may not be relevant to me and often the configuration (ex. how much DRAM and what kind of storage using SSD or HDD) isn't defined.
My choices assuming I need 16GB DRAM and 3TB of storage with an SSD for the boot drive are:
A) MacMini i7 2.6GHz with 16GB of DRAM and 256K SSD with 3TB external HDD over USB3 or TB (total cost about $1650 including HDD with an EPP discount)
B) 2012/13 Mac Pro Quad 3.2GHz refurbished by Apple upgraded to 16GB DRAM, 256k SSD and 3TB storage for about $2,700. (There are also some new models available on ebay and other sellers that would save about $300-400 of that total.)
C) Wait to see what the Haswell based MacMini's and new MacPros look like.
The MacMini has the obvious limitations that DRAM can't be expanded beyond 16GB for instance if I go to a Nikon 24-36MP camera, and the Intel 4000 graphics aren't that great. However, its not clear to me that graphics performance matters that much to Lightroom. Seems to matter more for photoship and video (I do occassionally build 15-20min slideshows in Proshow Gold.)
This is what I know based on internet search, which lacks any real-world experience, so I'd really appreciate any advice from experienced Mac users!
Dave
good things and all that!
