New pc or mac?

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Andy
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Hi all,

I'm trying to help my sister choose a new computer set up as hers is so slow now.

She uses a D810 so quite big raw files. She takes 500-2000+ photos a week and her catalogues are big. She is trying to use photo mechanic to cull images but this isn't working to import images in to lightroom at the moment. But regardless she is needing an updated set up.

The issue she is having is that when she uses light room, it is incredibly slow and she thinks this is due to the cataloguing size and that she's having to use external hdds for her catalogues (and also this means things get mixed about as the drive letters change) as her internal hdd is 1tb and this gets filled up quickly. It is very slow especially when editing through light room

I'm much more familiar with Pcs and was hoping that someone might be able to guide with mac vs pc. Is switching to mac quite straightforward if you haven't used one before?

It'll be used for a lot of light room and some photoshop.
The budget is £2-4k

The Mac she looking at is
Probably a Mac studio with 64gb ram m1 ultra processor and 1 or 2tb ssd hdd.

My questions about mac:
This mac studio only has the ssd hard drive, is there an effective way of using external hdds with this? Just as I assume it'll get filled up with programs as well as images etc.

For a Pc I was going to suggest:

CPU: I9-12900k

Ram- 64GB 3200mhz

GPU: 6GB GEFORCE GTX 1660 (will this gpu speed up lightroom/photoshop or does it need to be beefier?)

Hdds: 2x2tb SSDs and 2x4Tb hdds

But she is after something a bit physically smaller and is looking at mini pc style ones. Will these be suitable?

I was also going to suggest a NAS drive so any help with this would be appreciated but I might make a separate post about that

Any help massively appreciated!
 
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Cannot help with the PC specs but that Mac studio ultra is way overkill for Lightroom and PS.
It is more geared up to video editing, performance with PS and LR does not scale as you would expect with loads of cores.

The ordinary studio M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU will be more than ample for her tasks, if you can stretch to the 64gig ram then that comes in at £2599
That will leave around £1400 for a good monitor and a a couple of external drives. These can be plugged in quite easily with the ports at the back.

My own opinion and from my personal experience is that for toggers you do not need the latest and greatest, my i5 with 32 gig is more than comfortable with what I ask of it.

FWIW I have just watched a couple of YouTube vids where they review the new Studio and they say themselves it is far more powerful than what is needed.
 
Im editing thousands of images every week at lightning speed with Lightroom and Photoshop with a £1000 Mac mini .
 
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If she is using external HDDs is she using USB 2 or 3 - the connection speed can make a great difference.

I've had Mac and PC - for LR and PS it's moot which is better.

The PC specs sound fine - but beefier GPU's are better.

Once LR and PS catch up with the multithreaded competition like DXO, C1Pro, On1 RAW multi core CPU's and beefy GPU's really start to come into their own.

Plus - if she has a D810 - what's next, a D850 or Z7ii, and beyond that probably 60mp or 100mp files.

Thankfully she has a large budget for a new machine.

www.scan.co.uk

3XS GWP-ME A132R

Buy from Scan - 3XS GWP-ME A132R, AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 64GB DDR4, 16GB NVIDIA RTX A4000, 2TB M.2 SSD, Win 10 Pro - *SEE INFO*
www.scan.co.uk www.scan.co.uk

I am a big scan fan....

Pro Video PCs Your Workstation Your Way - 3XS

Your Workstation Your Way Cut, edit and tweak 4K/UHD videos in record time on our video editing PCs. Ideal for all film makers, from amateur home videos to blockbuster titles
www.scan.co.uk www.scan.co.uk

Dual Xeon's and EC RAM - very stable and bomb proof. Will edit 100mp medium format files on that like nothing so future proof.

When designing a PC - don't build it for the photo system you have now - build it for the one you'll have in 5 years time.
 
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scoped said:
Is switching to mac quite straightforward if you haven't used one before?
Click to expand...
Yes, I used a PC for more years than I care to remember but switched to Mac at the start of 'lockdown' ... best move I ever made, the Mac just works! :)
 
scoped said:
CPU: I9-12900k

Ram- 64GB 3200mhz

GPU: 6GB GEFORCE GTX 1660 (will this gpu speed up lightroom/photoshop or does it need to be beefier?)

Hdds: 2x2tb SSDs and 2x4Tb hdds
Click to expand...
CPU is slight overkill if only for ps and lr but fine. Ram is slow (for the latest standard), should use latest and greatest ddr5 with appropriate mother board.

That GPU is very outdated waste of time. May as well stick with integrated graphics or get at least rtx 3060 ti.

Strongly suggest no internal HDDs . They are terribly noisy and annoying. Some external ones in 2.5 in form are fine. Best is Nas in a different room well away. Pay attention to case and fans as well. You don't want to sit next to a vacuum cleaner
 
The bottle neck in your sister's workflow is lightroom.... you're welcome to keep throwing resources at LR, however, it's architecture is poor and this is what slows everybody down using LR. The other editing suites mentioned make more effective use of modern chip architecture and some use gpu hardware acceleration too.

For your sister... I have heard excellent things about the new M1 processors - however, I have not used one yet and could not say whether you'll see dramatic gains over a windows based machine, that said, thus far, the new m1 chips do look better value for money....

For what you are doing, ram speed is largely irrelevant, ram capacity, processor speed/cores and gpu capability will have a bigger impact on performance.

As the D810 files are large, you'll want to optimize the data pipeline in the PC. Currently, the M2 NVMe drives are fastest.... the newer external ssd's are very fast especially if using thunderbolt 4 / usb 3.2. Internal hdd's only make noise if their the spinning type, which for your application would be frustratingly slow (and a bottle neck) in this proposed system. NAS is excellent for mass storage, but it'll be far too slow for your application re. workflow and importing to lightroom etc. You're always better off trying to get your raw files onto your local machine before exporting etc. and then storing / backing up to a NAS.

Currently, LR really likes processor cores and individual core speed - I ran some experiments a while ago and posted on this forum about the effect cpu/ram/gpu has on LR.

For context, what is your sisters current set up?
 
I don’t use Lightroom, have moved over to DXO photo lab and Affinity but in my opinion the new apple M1 processors are excellent for photo processing and the way to go
The M1 pro processors are more than adequate the Max processors are overkill
I use a MacBook Pro with M1 pro and 32 gb ram it’s amazing really fast even with large files
 
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toohuge said:
The bottle neck in your sister's workflow is lightroom.... you're welcome to keep throwing resources at LR, however, it's architecture is poor and this is what slows everybody down using LR. The other editing suites mentioned make more effective use of modern chip architecture and some use gpu hardware acceleration too.
Click to expand...
That's such a bull it's ridiculous. Modern well specced pc flies through any lr tasks.
 
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A M1-Ultra Mac Studio would be absolute overkill and will blow your sister's budget. A M1 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD would be a more affordable option with plenty left over for external SSDs, etc.

When working with large catalogues, I've found working with Smart Previews extremely beneficial. They take a little extra time to generate when you import, but it's worthwhile cup of tea. BTW, the new Apple M CPUs chew through things like this (apparently).
 
I've used both PC and Mac intensively. My opinion on them has changed over the years but right now I think a decent specced Mac is easier to buy, looks better and is quieter. A decent specced PC is cheaper and more flexible. And that's basically it. Modern operating systems are pretty good but still if Apple want you to do something then it's a great experience and far easier than doing it on a PC - if they don't then you may as well give up.

Looking at those requirements, I think I'd want a machine with a hot swap drive socket. Get a stack of SSD drives and plug them in the socket for each major project / month /whatevs. You get the speed of an internal drive for the expandability of an external. Catalogue all the pics on a big fast internal so you know which drive to load for them. USB3 / Firewire will probably run about as fast as a hot swap drive in the real world but will cost more - a nice internal 1TB SSD will cost about £80 which will save £10 - £20 over external. It will also be tidier :)

BTW my custom build PC (designed by the good people here on the forum) came in at £1,700 2.5 years ago. It handles D800 raws just fine. I've just specced something similar out and it came to £1800 with 2TB NVME, 4TB SSD and another 4TB of spinning metal. £4K would be overkill IMO - spend 2 and save 2 for upgrades. I'd be very surprised if anything from Apple could touch it for the money.
 
toohuge said:
Not quite ... This review https://www.dpreview.com/articles/3278896840/head-to-head-adobe-lightroom-classic-vs-capture-one-21 suggests Capture One to be significantly faster at exporting images that LR - through better optimisation / utilisation of modern chip architecture and better use of GPU acceleration
Click to expand...
That's irrelevant when things already happen lightning speed, and if export of 100 files takes 5s longer then so what? You make it out like LR performs snail slow on modern PC like it does on 10 year old wreck. That is clearly not the case.
 
LongLensPhotography said:
That's irrelevant when things already happen lightning speed, and if export of 100 files takes 5s longer then so what? You make it out like LR performs snail slow on modern PC like it does on 10 year old wreck. That is clearly not the case.
Click to expand...
I am not sure why you're so aggressive about this - The experiment showed Capture One to be (in one case) 27 minutes faster on export than LR, to some that's a significant time saving, to others, perhaps it's irrelevant.

I made no such inference - I was trying to help the OP avoid investing large amounts on the latest computer hardware to be faced with long export times from LR
 
toohuge said:
I am not sure why you're so aggressive about this
Click to expand...
Just setting things straight I'm afraid. Your original post claims LR is unusable regardless of hardware. That's basically what is reads like.

toohuge said:
27 minutes faster on export than LR
Click to expand...
Was that really minutes???! Have you used it at all?

toohuge said:
I made no such inference - I was trying to help the OP avoid investing large amounts on the latest computer hardware to be faced with long export times from LR
Click to expand...
that's cool, because eithr LR or C1 it doesn't need top of the line today, but may do in 3-5 years time...

Besides, the key in choosing software, and more so when deciding to ditch all your libaries the key points are FEATURES. Proper cats and Photoshop are two massive ones that no 5 or 27s difference exporting theoretical 100 image batch will ever outweigh outside of benchamark lab.
 
Nikon f1.8 said:
Yup
Capture one is one helluva fast piece of software, LR seems to be stuck in a progression cycle
Click to expand...

Yes - as is ON1 and DXO but C1Pro seems very capable at utilising multi core/thread machines and GPU power. Probably because it is designed around Phase One digital backs so their users will have very high PC's and Mac Pro towers.

If you don't use Photoshop regularly - I'd argue LR has very little appeal over C1pro, DXO etc
 
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PS - was looking at the new MacStudio -

www.apple.com

Mac Studio

The new Mac Studio. Supercharged by the M2 Max and M2 Ultra chip. Extensive connectivity. Stunningly compact.
www.apple.com

For the OP's budget that sits right in the middle. As LR/PS get optimised versions for M1 etc this looks quite a compelling purchase. Quick bit of googling reveals this is a very powerful and capable machine.

I've had PC's and Mac's before - not really fussed - which ever suits my needs at the time.

www.apple.com

Mac Studio - Technical Specifications

View all the technical specifications for Mac Studio with the M2 Max or M2 Ultra chip.
www.apple.com

Specs wise take the basic one - configure to 64gb and take a 1tb storage option and use thunderbolt/USB3 etc SSDs for files etc.

The OP's budget will support a great PC or Mac.
 
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I use them both and find neither one outshines the other tbh, it’s personal preference and that’s about it.

Want something pretty, quiet and fast? Buy a mac

Want something versatile (upgradability) and fast? Buy a PC

I’ve personally found that macOS has gone downhill over the last few iterations, and Windows 11 is getting better and better.

It should be noted though, if you’re concerned about energy usage as we all should be, then the M1 in the mac is unparalleled in performance-per-watt.

Lastly, I wouldn’t really look at the Xeon processors, they are mainly meant for high performance in 24/7 sustained operations. And really don’t offer much benefit in consumer-class requirements.
 
Since you have quite a large budget I'd suggest designing things carefully to help.

Mac: as said above, the Mac is fast, quite but has no upgrade path in M1 form, and the studio will be excruciatingly expensive if you want a decent amount of internal storage. Go down the Mac route and plan to add fast external storage for working files plus large amounts of external medium/slow archival storage.

PC: will be fast, flexible, very upgradeable but in general a little noisier and less pretty. Faster storage can be built inside the case with a couple of NVME drives to work from plus conventional SSDs for mid-speed/silent/lower cost and external HDDs/NAS for backup & archiving.

Remember that pulling files off a spinning drive will really bottleneck the system compared to the faster solid state drives.

Other things:
LR and PS don't make much use of a decent graphics card, so something like a 1660 will be OK. If she plans to move to software that does use GPU power then again as said, a 3060 or 3070 would be recommended.
I would probably go AMD for processor, as I did last year when I built a new system.
Last year the plan was to migrate my LR6 library to On1 PhotoRaw 2022, but the migration tool did not work well and PR is much more useful as a Lightroom plugin than as the main editing/cataloging application.
My personal preference is PC over Mac because I never feel that I can trust the OS to do things the way I want and not to hide/change/break tools with updates, plus the hardware can sometimes come with serious flaws that get denied & ignored for a long time. I ran a Macbook for a while, and in some ways it was fantastic, but was also deeply frustrating at times.
 
Hi everyone,

Sorry to be so slow at replying, I'll try and respond to you all!

So from the replies it seems like her laptop might not be too far off the spec needed to run LR well (I'm not sure of the spec off the top of my head but it was a decent Dell I7 at the beginning of 2017, so 5 years old now) but the age and HDD's space might be the main issue. It is good to hear the computer doesn't have to be a monster! My pc is a gaming one that I built, so I always go overkill with power and assumed LR/PS would benefit from this.
The slowness she gets isn't exporting etc as she can set it up and leave it. The main issue is editing in LR where she uses a brush and it literally takes a few seconds to finish the action as she watches it, which doesn't happen on my pc, and didn't used to happen to her. But, she is now taking and editing so many photos she needs to have a long term solution.

Nikon f1.8 said:
Cannot help with the PC specs but that Mac studio ultra is way overkill for Lightroom and PS.
It is more geared up to video editing, performance with PS and LR does not scale as you would expect with loads of cores.

The ordinary studio M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU will be more than ample for her tasks, if you can stretch to the 64gig ram then that comes in at £2599
That will leave around £1400 for a good monitor and a a couple of external drives. These can be plugged in quite easily with the ports at the back.

My own opinion and from my personal experience is that for toggers you do not need the latest and greatest, my i5 with 32 gig is more than comfortable with what I ask of it.

FWIW I have just watched a couple of YouTube vids where they review the new Studio and they say themselves it is far more powerful than what is needed.
Click to expand...
Ok that is good to hear! I think the Mac plan would be 64GB m1 Max with 4TB SSD and do all the work on the internal drive, then ping the longer term storage to a synology NAS drive - would that work well?
stumac said:
Im editing thousands of images every week at lightning speed with Lightroom and Photoshop with a £1000 Mac mini .
Click to expand...

Is there any lag at all when using brushes etc with lightroom with large raw files? How big is your hdd and are you using externals/editing off of external drives?
SFTPhotography said:
If she is using external HDDs is she using USB 2 or 3 - the connection speed can make a great difference.

I've had Mac and PC - for LR and PS it's moot which is better.

The PC specs sound fine - but beefier GPU's are better.

Once LR and PS catch up with the multithreaded competition like DXO, C1Pro, On1 RAW multi core CPU's and beefy GPU's really start to come into their own.

Plus - if she has a D810 - what's next, a D850 or Z7ii, and beyond that probably 60mp or 100mp files.

Thankfully she has a large budget for a new machine.

www.scan.co.uk

3XS GWP-ME A132R

Buy from Scan - 3XS GWP-ME A132R, AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 64GB DDR4, 16GB NVIDIA RTX A4000, 2TB M.2 SSD, Win 10 Pro - *SEE INFO*
www.scan.co.uk www.scan.co.uk

I am a big scan fan....

Pro Video PCs Your Workstation Your Way - 3XS

Your Workstation Your Way Cut, edit and tweak 4K/UHD videos in record time on our video editing PCs. Ideal for all film makers, from amateur home videos to blockbuster titles
www.scan.co.uk www.scan.co.uk

Dual Xeon's and EC RAM - very stable and bomb proof. Will edit 100mp medium format files on that like nothing so future proof.

When designing a PC - don't build it for the photo system you have now - build it for the one you'll have in 5 years time.
Click to expand...
I agree with future proofing! That's why the budget is bigger than typical, as she wants to buy once and use it for 6 or 7 years if possible. And she is going to move to a mirrorless system too, most likely. I'm a scan fan too, I have a 3XS laptop and it has been a good bang for buck system.

gramps said:
Yes, I used a PC for more years than I care to remember but switched to Mac at the start of 'lockdown' ... best move I ever made, the Mac just works! :)
Click to expand...
Did it take you long to learn to navigate/use the mac as efficiently as a pc? What mac do you use?

LCPete said:
I don’t use Lightroom, have moved over to DXO photo lab and Affinity but in my opinion the new apple M1 processors are excellent for photo processing and the way to go
The M1 pro processors are more than adequate the Max processors are overkill
I use a MacBook Pro with M1 pro and 32 gb ram it’s amazing really fast even with large files
Click to expand...

Is there any lag at all and would 64gb improve things at all?
How difficult was moving over from LR and is DXO/affinity much better? What was the reason you swapped over?

I've been looking at NAS drives and will likely make a separate thread because I don't want to derail this one as it has been very helpful!
 
scoped said:
Is there any lag at all when using brushes etc with lightroom with large raw files? How big is your hdd and are you using externals/editing off of external drives?
Click to expand...
This is why working with Smart Previews makes so much more sense. The previews can be stored locally. You don't even need to have the drive with the RAW files attached. You generate the Smart Preview on import and work with that. When you come to export, reconnect the drive and the changes will be applied. Working with RAW files in LR is going to push your hardware. Smart Previews are the way to go. Regardless of what hardware you have.

A Mac with a 4TB SSD is overkill. 1TB will be fine for Catalogues with Smart Previews with the RAW files stored on (cheaper) external SSDs.

There's plenty of documentation on Adobe's sight that details the benefits of Smart Previews and working with external drives.

Hope this helps.
 
scoped said:
The main issue is editing in LR where she uses a brush and it literally takes a few seconds to finish the action as she watches it, which doesn't happen on my pc, and didn't used to happen to her.
Click to expand...

LR benefits most from a fast processor (possibly take single core speed over multicore) and fast storage (SSD) plus plenty of fast memory. My Macbook would do that, and it was really frustrating. In the case you're describing there I'd do a fresh windows install to see if you can recover a bit more performance (you said it used to be faster) and simultaneously switch to SSD for OS and short term storage. Even an older-style SATA drive will give performance a boost.
 
Hi there’s no lag at all with the MacBook Pro with M1 pro and 32gb I don’t think there’s much advantage to be gained in going for 64 gb
Main reason for moving away from Adobe was when I retired I wanted to cut back on expenses so went for affinity photo as it’s a one off purchase, although the pay monthly for Adobe is actually worth it , I just felt I didn’t need it as affinity did everything I needed at the time when I tried it out
I went to DXO photolab purely for the excellent raw conversion results
I never did use the catalog features of LR
 
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scoped said:
Is there any lag at all when using brushes etc with lightroom with large raw files? How big is your hdd and are you using externals/editing off of external drives?
Click to expand...
No, not even a hint of that with 50mp raw files. I only have 5600x and rtx3060ti 32gb ram pc. That's all I could manage to get last year and it's perfectly fine. I do very extensive brushing and it's fine. Do your spot removal first as that helps a lot with performance for some reason. Latest gen CPU and decent ram seem to be the key bits

By the way this was a right disaster with 2014 mbp and just 20mp raws.
 
scoped said:
Did it take you long to learn to navigate/use the mac as efficiently as a pc? What mac do you use?
Click to expand...
I started using a couple of older iMacs when lockdown started to enable good use of Zoom.
I picked it up with a few youtube videos in a few days and supplemented with a few questions on MacRumors.
I now use an M1 iMac and do all of my processing easily and quickly with DXO Photolab 5 and Affinity.
 
Is there any lag at all when using brushes etc with lightroom with large raw files? How big is your hdd and are you using externals/editing off of external drives?

No lag at all . I'm using Samsung t7 hard drives that i store and work off so no images are ever on the Mac itself
 
andrewc said:
Try a Mac before committing. Its quite different and not everyone likes it. A session at an Apple Store should be enough to convince your sister whether to stay with Windows or switching to Mac OS.
Click to expand...

This is good advice too.
 
Hi all,

Just wanted to say thank you again, I've passed on the info, so we will see what she does, but I think she is leaning towards a mac
Thanks as ever!
 
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