New Mini for Abobe products

[Dentifrice]

Hi guys,

I currently have the mac mini 2011 (core i5 2.3 ghz with 8gb of ram).I have a DIY fusion drive.I work with some Adobe products. 90 % of the time it's Lightroom and 10 % Photoshop.

I'm also running Plex media server on this machine BTW.

I work with big raw files (Nikon D600). I must say it's not particularly fast when I work on these files. Several second to render. When I'm exporting files, I can barely continue to work on other files.

Now I see the mac mini 2012 which I could buy with a core i7 2.6 ghz.

I was wondering if the upgrade would be useful. I did some google and some people are saying that lightroom would befenit multiple cores and some others are saying that they don't see the difference. Adobe says that both softwares are multithreaded but it doesn't seems to make a lot of difference.

Anyone here have some experience with this ?

thanks

 

[Schnort]

I doubt you'd see much difference between an i5-sandy bridge and an i7 ivy bridge.

A bigger bang for your buck would be maxing out the RAM.

 

[Dentifrice]

yeah I though about that but when I look at the activity monitor in Mavericks, it seems that the "memory pressure" is really OK

should I trust that ?

 

[Wuiffi]

there is an awesome nMP review from an Austrian photographer here, which says:

Sure, 100 Nikon D800 RW images, that does not sound like much. But even the SixCore MacPro takes over 4 (!) Minutes to get the create 1:1 previews job done. Which is the reason why most Timelapsers love and hate Lightroom. It is such a slow-ass software, when it comes to process large amounts of images. As well as images ALWAYS take around a second to load in full size view if you cycle back and forth during LRtimelapse leveling, no matter if you are on a MacPro or whatnot and regardless if you have rendered 1:1 previews before.

Just check out the processor load of this indexing. Looks like the MacPro is just falling asleep most of the time. Indexing like this should be done in 30 seconds or less, not 4 Minutes+!

So it is possible that it's not the hardware but the software!

 

[chrfr]

I doubt you'd see much difference between an i5-sandy bridge and an i7 ivy bridge.

Agreed. It makes no sense to upgrade to a computer that's already more than a year-old model for what will be a largely imperceptible upgrade.

 

[Dentifrice]

thanks everyone for your answers

I think you are right. Upgrading doesn't seem to be a good idea right now and lightroom performance could be software problem so...

I'll wait until the next mac mini comes up (maybe in 2020...) and instead of 1000 $ computer I'll buy a ipad mini retina

thanks !

 

[ElectronGuru]

I haven't stretch the legs of the setup, but my 2010 MBP is running 6D images faster after going to SSD. You didnt specify your drive, but if its still HDD, something to consider. You could go all out on a raid 0, say dual 480s.

 

[blanka]

The 2.6 quad will be a huge improvement, and I would get the stock and add 16Gb and a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro and add those myself.
Don't Fusion, just run OS, Apps +temp disk from the SSD and do the file storage on the 1TB stock drive.

Also consider using NX2 Software, not perse because of speed, but to unleash the true quality of your D600 images. I use NX2 with D800 files, even bigger, on both a 2011 2.5 Mini and a Core2Duo 3.1 Ghz, and I have no problem using the software, and in zoomed out all modifications show instantly. Only moments it takes some time to render is when zooming in, but I usually do that in step 2 in Photoshop, which can handle the 16 bit 36 Mpixel files as well with relative ease. Note that my Photoshop is limited to 4GB ram and runs in Rosetta! The big reason it still works well is the fast drive (Barracuda 3TB on the Core2Duo machine, Sammy 830 SSD on the Mini).
Saving the D800 files as 16-bit TIF temp in NX2 to open in PS takes about 10 seconds on the Core2Duo with HD and about 4 on the Mini with SSD, I don't mind, cleaning up the 36 mpixel files takes a multitude of time after that .

 

[Dentifrice]

humm ok

so...does it make a difference or not upgrading from i5 2.3 to i7 2.6 ?

previous posts seem to think otherwise...

 

[Schnort]

Again, it's doubtful the i7-2.6 quad will be much improvement over the i5-2.3-dual of the previous generation.

Ivy bridge is about 10% faster, clock per clock (a plus for the i7)
Lightroom apparently doesn't care about multiple threads (so no benefit to quad vs. dual)
The top end of a single core turbo boosted i5 and i7 are very close, with surprisingly the i5 potentially edging out the i7 due to thermal issues (when the i5/i7 series first came out, the gamers all took i5s instead of i7s because their top end was higher than the i7s)
The i7 has 6MB of cache, the i5 has 3MB of cache. (a plus for the i7).

All in all, it sounds like you might see a 10% improvement, maybe 15%, by upgrading to a i7-2.6 ivy bridge.

It's your money, but I think it would be better spent on a faster disk and more physical RAM. And all those upgrades can come with you to the next generation mac mini (assuming the RAM is still SODIMMs and not soldered down)

 

[Dentifrice]

I already have an SSD and memory seems fine if I look at the Activity Monitor.

I'll wait for the next mac mini instead.

 

[Fishrrman]

[[ does it make a difference or not upgrading from i5 2.3 to i7 2.6 ? ]]

Yes, it will.
Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

More power always means "more power".

 

[Dentifrice]

I understand but for the price, a 10-15 % of more "power" isn't enough.