researching the iMac 27" Retina Display . . . . . . . . . your thoughts and insights are welcome

I have a 5k 27 with i7 4 ghz and 32 mb ram, 3 tb fusion, 4gb vid card.......i only do photo editing with it. cant ask for more (until something faster comes out).

I don't understand the "get the machine that suits your workload" philosophy. you should always buy the most machine you can afford. however, if spending the extra 500 or 1000 dollars to get the better gear means not paying your bills this month, you probably shouldn't be buying a new computer at this time in your life in the first place.

go big or save up and go big later. you will never regret your purchase decisions, imo.

Well, what exactly is the point of paying extra for a machine that won't really get your work done any faster? A photographer could go with Quad top tier graphics cards... But why? What will that do for them in the long run other than take up money that could have been used to buy something more useful, like a new lens. Would you suggest that someone buy a large semi truck 'just because they can afford it' when a quarter ton truck is what meets their needs?

Higgs Boson wrote in post #17714352
I have a 5k 27 with i7 4 ghz and 32 mb ram, 3 tb fusion, 4gb vid card.......i only do photo editing with it.

Hey, Higgs
Those specs lead me to remember a question I've had: . You mention a 4gb vid card. . Is that an upgrade, or the standard? If it is an upgrade, and you only do photo editing, then I am wondering how the better vid card helps. . I plan to do pretty much only photo editing. . I don't play video games.....so how would a better vid card help me if I never play video games?

Higgs Boson wrote in post #17714352
I don't understand the "get the machine that suits your workload" philosophy. you should always buy the most machine you can afford. however, if spending the extra 500 or 1000 dollars to get the better gear means not paying your bills this month, you probably shouldn't be buying a new computer at this time in your life in the first place.

go big or save up and go big later. you will never regret your purchase decisions, imo.

I completely agree with this. . I think that if I have the best computer available, then it will last longer than if I cheap out and get something that is only "capable of meeting my needs". . That's kind of the same philosophy I use for just about everything - power tools like table saws and routers, kitchen devices such as juicers and toasters, etc.........if I get something much better than what I need, it usually lasts much longer. . And for me, especially with a computer, longevity is of the utmost importance.

The 4.0 i7 processor is only $250 more than the standard processor - why in the world would I ever NOT get it?

If longevity is very important to you, then buy a mac pro. The imac's processors will change in a year or so, but a mac pro's processors will last a cycle longer. Not that I am against buying a 5k imac, because it is very capable machine!

Luckless wrote in post #17714376
Well, what exactly is the point of paying extra for a machine that won't really get your work done any faster? A photographer could go with Quad top tier graphics cards... But why? What will that do for them in the long run other than take up money that could have been used to buy something more useful, like a new lens. Would you suggest that someone buy a large semi truck 'just because they can afford it' when a quarter ton truck is what meets their needs?

A large semi truck doesn't fit in the same space as a 3/4 ton.
They don't use the same amount of fuel and they can't fill up in the same places or go to the grocery store easily in a semi unless you are delivering.
Cost of ownership is continuously more expensive for a semi.

Buying a higher spec computer costs a few hundred or 1000 or whatever dollars more once. It isn't going to cost you more each month, take up more desk space, etc.

Not a great example. Maybe a better one is why would anyone buy a Corvette when they can just buy a Miata....or a Cruze. And I think we all know the answer to that as well.

The faster computer might not save you hours off your day, but for me, nothing is worse than waiting for a picture to load or for your local brush to catch up with your strokes. That is every stroke, every picture, every time you edit. And if you edit a wedding, that's a lot of irritation.

I think it's a given we aren't editing selfies given our participation in this forum, right?

Tom Reichner wrote in post #17714389
Hey, Higgs
Those specs lead me to remember a question I've had: . You mention a 4gb vid card. . Is that an upgrade, or the standard? If it is an upgrade, and you only do photo editing, then I am wondering how the better vid card helps. . I plan to do pretty much only photo editing. . I don't play video games.....so how would a better vid card help me if I never play video games?

I completely agree with this. . I think that if I have the best computer available, then it will last longer than if I cheap out and get something that is only "capable of meeting my needs". . That's kind of the same philosophy I use for just about everything - power tools like table saws and routers, kitchen devices such as juicers and toasters, etc.........if I get something much better than what I need, it usually lasts much longer. . And for me, especially with a computer, longevity is of the utmost importance.

The 4.0 i7 processor is only $250 more than the standard processor - why in the world would I ever NOT get it?

It comes with 2GB vid card which is probably fine. LR and PS use the GPU now for some processes so why not get the 4?
I'll edit an occasional GoPro vid but mostly pics.

I also subscribe to the "buy once" philosophy. Pay 150% of the price of the cheaper one is less expensive than buying the cheap one, being dissatisfied, then buying the more expensive one in the end.

Of course, not every time does more expensive mean better, I dont buy my clothes at Neiman Marcus....sometimes it's just conspicuous consumption!

Tom Reichner wrote in post #17714348
Yes, that's about all I will be doing with it. That and streaming Netflix movies from time to time. I'm not sure where the "catch-22" comes in.

Because the i7 won't show any performance benefits in tasks that don't come close to utilizing 100% of the CPU for extended periods, when compared to tasks such as video rendering.
You may as well buy the i5 and get the exact same speed, if you'll only be doing processing in bursts, which things like Photoshop and Lightroom do.
Meanwhile, tasks that do crunch the CPU over time will make it hit a thermal limit that limits the potential you paid for.
Having an i7 is also useful for video/data streaming, but that's something you're not likely to do either.

Kolor-Pikker wrote in post #17714340
Pretty much, yes, but if you're buying a top-end i7, are you really only going to do photo editing with it? Catch-22.

I have owned i7 PC's running Win 7 & 8, and now have the i7 5K mac. I have run CS6 on both of them and can quite honestly say that I have not hand any issue with thermal throttling ever. You are weighing what set disadvantages you want to have. On one hand you have the crap called Microsoft that I will say has given me far more issues over the years with dumbfounded incompatibilities and things that just broke with updates over updates. The iMac has it's set of things that it does funny too, and you just learn to live with it.

Some complain about not being able to hook up another computer to the iMac's built in monitor. So what. I have run dual screen for quite a while, and if I even needed to connect a laptop to another monitor there is the second monitor right on my desktop. But once you start working with the retinal screen, why would you want to use a laptop for anything?

I am not the fastest computer learner. I have found that the one-to-one concept never appealed to me as:

1. I am not likely to want to lug my 27" iMac into the store.
2. When I have done any of the group training, that are the exact same people who do the one-to-one, I ended up knowing far more than they did on the topics that I was looking to get help on.
3. I bought applecare. and that gives me unlimited telephone support and I can phone up apple and get access to far more trained people who can teach me the issues that I need to know as I seem to push the envelope beyond the 'apple store genius' level. I swear they are really just average guys who are there for the soccer mum's who bought an apple computer and want to know how to surf for the latest fashions. When I have asked some of the trainers questions and they respond 'I didn't know it could do that' you know there is something wrong.

mjmackinnon wrote in post #17716608
I have owned i7 PC's running Win 7 & 8, and now have the i7 5K mac. I have run CS6 on both of them and can quite honestly say that I have not hand any issue with thermal throttling ever.

Try converting a video with something that can take advantage of all cores and HT, like Handbrake or Adobe Media Encoder, I have to use smcFanControl to set the fans to maximum speed to knock 15ºc or more off the temperature of the CPU. Just because you don't do stuff like that, that doesn't mean it's a non-problem.

I built my own PC in January and I regret not buying the iMac 5K.
I wrote a blogpost about it:

As a 13" Macbook Air and low end desktop PC owner, it was time for me to upgrade to a more serious platform for photo and video editing.

With limited onboard storage, the Mac Pro was not an option.
My choices were the 27" iMac (either regular or 5K), a custom build PC or a Hackintosh (more on that here: http://www.tonymacx86.​com/ ).
The Hackintosh did appeal to me but it would have restricted my build to very specific parts. I would have installed Windows anyway as a few softwares I use are not supported by OSX, so I ruled it out.
I felt the non-5K iMac would not be powerful enough for my use, and a maxed-out 5K iMac would run too expensive. So I built my own PC.

The 27" non-5K iMac I considered was the 3.5Ghz i7 (3.9 turbo) with 16GB of Ram, a 3TB Fusion drive (which combines a 128GB SSD and a 3TB hard drive) and the GTX775M graphics card. As of February 2015, this costs just under €2800 or £2050. (update, this iMac is no longer available for purchase)

The 5K iMac with all the available options is close to my current setup. It uses the same i7-4790K CPU running at 4.0Ghz (4.4 Turbo) with 16GB of Ram, a 3TB Fusion Drive and the AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4GB graphics card. This runs at €3450 or £2550

The PC I built is based on the i7-4790K processor, 16GB of 1866Mhz Ram, a 256GB SSD + 2 x 2TB 7200Rpm hard drives and the GTX970 4GB GPU. I will upgrade it to 32GB of Ram and will add a 512GB SSD. With a Windows 7 licence and a few accessories (optical drive, SD / micro SD card reader, high end CPU cooler, quiet case fans, mid-tower quiet case (Fractal Design R5)) and a 27" 1440p IPS display, it costs around €2200 or £1600.

The GTX775M is benchmarked at 4530 points ( http://www.videocardbe​nchmark.net/high_end_g​pus.html ), the R9 295X 4GB scores just below 5000 and the GTX970 4GB tops at 8603 points. Do not confuse the mobile versions of the graphics cards used in the iMac when reading the chart. The R9 M290X gets a score of only 2547 while the desktop 290X card reaches 6875.

The main goal of going high-end was to speed up the operation when photo and video editing.
I use the Adobe suite (Lightroom, Premiere Pro and After Effects) and their softwares are fairly optimised. Both Premiere Pro and After Effects use GPU accelerations to speed up rendering times, this is why I went for the GTX970 graphics card with lots of CUDA cores and Vram.

A couple of months later, here are my thoughts:

Choosing the parts and building the PC was an interesting experience. It certainly was way easier than I thought and I learnt a lot during the whole process.
I enjoy the upgradability of my system. I can re-use hard drives from my previous PC or setup a RAID array very easily. If the graphics power ever becomes insufficient, I can always add a second graphics card in SLI and double the graphic power.
I tried a few games in Ultra, all run very smoothly ... except Flight Simulator X.

Here is what I did not expect:

Despite choosing quiet fans and a quiet case, the PC is nowhere near quiet even when idling.
Coil whine. If you've never heard of it before, have a look on youtube. It is a high pitch electronic noise and is very audible.
Both my graphics card and the power unit suffer from coil noise and it is extremely annoying. This alone makes it worth getting a much more pricey and slower iMac. Fortunately, it only happens when stressing the GPU (when gaming).
Boot times are nowhere near as fast as my Macbook Air.
I miss a lot of features from OSX that simply don't exist under Windows.
Windows can't display raw (.CR2) photo files natively, OSX can. (Edit: I installed an add-on and Windows display them now)

Photo editing with Adobe Lightroom 5 is actually not a lot faster than on the much lower-end Macbook Air. On the go operations like clarity or tone curves are fast on both systems, the Macbook Air slows down a lot when making finer adjustments like spot removal or using the adjustment brush ... and so does my custom built PC. It is not as slow but it certainly is slower than I expected. Zooming used to be very slow on the Macbook and it is not a lot smoother on the PC. A big disappointment is that the PC is not faster than the Macbook Air when it comes to exporting files. Photographers that retouch hundreds of photos at once hate to wait sometimes up to 10 minutes for Lightroom to export their images. I simply see no difference between my 1.3Ghz dual-core Macbook Air and my 4-core / 8-thread 4.0Ghz PC.

Adobe Premiere Pro.
Believe it or not, my low-end Macbook Air can run Premiere Pro and edit 1080p video files. It is slow but it works.
Now this is where my custom built PC truly excels. Everything is very smooth, there is no lag even when non-rendered edits are played-back in their original size. I've seen Adobe Premiere Pro running on a high-end iMac and there is no comparison. The custom build is simply faster and smoother.

Knowing all this, would I go for the custom built PC? The honest answer is ... no.
Unless your job is to edit 4K videos, the iMac is more than enough.
For a similar price, an iMac would be well lower-spec'd than a PC. If you're spending €2000 / £1500 on your system, it will run most programs you throw at it with no hiccups. Sure, it might take longer to render your heavy video files but you'll save on startup times and less software bugs.
Now, if you're a serious gamer, you already know that Macs aren't for you.

Here is the PC I built:

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/quYR​eX

Not surprised about the coil whine on the MSI 970 and CX750M, it's a known problem with the MSI variant, and CX power supplies just aren't that great, I would've gone with an Asus/EVGA card and an EVGA Supernova/SeaSonic PSU.

This is also a QC problem, and if you noticed it, you should've RMA'd the parts right away. While some components are known to whine more often than others, it's still considered a defect. Not sure if Macs have more strict QC, but it can happen with any electronic component in any computer, no exceptions.

Otherwise, between the BeQuite! cooler and Refine R5, your system should be dead silent. If you can hear fan noise at all, maybe you've forgotten to set up your fan curves or something.

Regarding boot times, look into whether your motherboard supports quick boot options, many mobos have have features that they can delay or avoid checking on boot to speed things up. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple optimized their boot times already, but on a PC it's something you have to do yourself. Of course MacBooks also use m.2 SSDs, and you didn't mention whether yours is SATA based or m.2, ultimately that has a pretty big impact as well, as m.2 SSDs tend to be 50~100% faster overall. Throw a Samsung XP951 in there and watch it fly.

golfcharlie wrote in post #17719941
Photo editing with Adobe Lightroom 5 is actually not a lot faster than on the much lower-end Macbook Air. On the go operations like clarity or tone curves are fast on both systems, the Macbook Air slows down a lot when making finer adjustments like spot removal or using the adjustment brush ... and so does my custom built PC. It is not as slow but it certainly is slower than I expected. Zooming used to be very slow on the Macbook and it is not a lot smoother on the PC. A big disappointment is that the PC is not faster than the Macbook Air when it comes to exporting files. Photographers that retouch hundreds of photos at once hate to wait sometimes up to 10 minutes for Lightroom to export their images. I simply see no difference between my 1.3Ghz dual-core Macbook Air and my 4-core / 8-thread 4.0Ghz PC.

Interesting conclusion and the opposite to what I've seen. I have a MacBook Air, Surface Pro 2 and a i7 4770K desktop. LR and PS CS6 run about the same on the MacBook Air and Surface Pro 2 (SLOW), but it's night and day faster on the desktop. Yes, simple edits are the same, but I can also do simple edits on my 4 year old Dell laptop running Windows 7 with 4 GB RAM and also see little difference.

For the same processor and RAM there appears to me to be zero difference between Win 10 and OSX.

It sounds to me like you have some sort of bottleneck in your configuration. You certainly aren't CPU or RAM limited.

A big question is, where are you pulling the images from and where are you exporting to?

There is also a small quirk that seems to still be in LR's design, where the exporting process specifically calls waits throughout its cycle. In theory this means that your computer stays responsive, so you can use a work flow such as "Edit 10 photos, export, and while exporting begin editing the next batch", which would work great... Except for those of us who tend to sort through thousands of photos to make selections, then do light editing on a few hundred, then run through all of the selected photos to check that everything looks consistent, and finally export as one batch.

If you export in parallel, that is to say you split your selection of photos into 3 groups, and start an export on group A, then export group B, then C, you can actually finish the job way faster on some hardware setups than if you were to do a single export.

Pulling and pushing files to a networked server or slow external drive can also have a huge impact on things, along with not having a suitable amount of ram. (However in watching my main work station I rarely see LRCC2015 get over 4GB, I think, at any given time. I really should try and remember to run more careful benchmarking next time I'm doing a big set of processing. It is a very rare day that I actually go over 50% ram usage on my 16GB system, so if you are building a system it may be worth considering starting with a motherboard that supports 4 ram slots, and filling 2 with 8GB with room to upgrade to easily pop in another pair down the road if you do find yourself hitting 90%)

The two systems I'm using currently on a consistent basis are an older 13" MBP with the dual core 2.5GHz i5 processor, and the workstation (due for an upgrade at some point, but still good enough that I'm in no rush) is an i5-2500 quad core running at 3.7GHz. Both saw a very impressive boost when switched from a spinning disk to a SATA solid state for the drive hosting photos. I don't seem to see a huge difference between exporting to a hard drive vs exporting to the solid state, but I haven't tested this against hosting all the .cr2 files on one SSD and then exporting to a different SSD.

However I see a far greater overall throughput on exports with the faster quad core processor desktop, and the quad core desktop handles 3-4 parallel export tasks, whereas the MacBook's dual core seems to prefer just two stream exporting.

(Sorting and time to render a given image on the desktop lags behind the Macbook by a hair, but that appears to simply be due to the higher resolution dual screen setup the desktop is running on an older graphics card compared to the small single monitor output I'm asking from the laptop.)

Kolor-Pikker wrote in post #17719959
Not surprised about the coil whine on the MSI 970 and CX750M, it's a known problem with the MSI variant, and CX power supplies just aren't that great, I would've gone with an Asus/EVGA card and an EVGA Supernova/SeaSonic PSU.

Otherwise, between the BeQuite! cooler and Refine R5, your system should be dead silent. If you can hear fan noise at all, maybe you've forgotten to set up your fan curves or something.

Regarding boot times, look into whether your motherboard supports quick boot options, many mobos have have features that they can delay or avoid checking on boot to speed things up.

When I bought it, I was told not to go cheap on the PSU. The CX750M wasn't exactly cheap so I didn't expect any problem. I took a lot of time to decide which CPU, GPU or CPU cooler to get, I didn't think too much when it came to the power supply. Clearly, I should have gone for something higher end like the SeaSonic you mention (which uses fans that only spin under heavy load).
It is also where most of the noise comes from, the fan is very noisy. I will change it eventually.

Boot times take a while mostly because the PC boots, then stops, then boots again. Most people with this motherboard have the same issue, I haven't found out how to correct it. It is not a huge deal but I'd rather have a PC that boots faster. On average it takes 45 seconds to reach the Desktop screen.

Bob_A wrote in post #17720032
Interesting conclusion and the opposite to what I've seen. I have a MacBook Air, Surface Pro 2 and a i7 4770K desktop. LR and PS CS6 run about the same on the MacBook Air and Surface Pro 2 (SLOW), but it's night and day faster on the desktop. Yes, simple edits are the same, but I can also do simple edits on my 4 year old Dell laptop running Windows 7 with 4 GB RAM and also see little difference.

For the same processor and RAM there appears to me to be zero difference between Win 10 and OSX.

It sounds to me like you have some sort of bottleneck in your configuration. You certainly aren't CPU or RAM limited.

I'm still using Lightroom 5, perhaps Lightroom 6 would improve the overall performance as it uses the GPU for some of its tasks.
But now that you mention it, I have all my photos on the spinning hard drive. The SSD is used for the OS, some programs (including Lightroom) and my Adobe Premiere Pro sequence and files.

The plan is to change the power unit and to add another SSD but ultimately, I wonder whether money would be better spent towards buying an iMac down the road.

golfcharlie wrote in post #17720501
When I bought it, I was told not to go cheap on the PSU. The CX750M wasn't exactly cheap so I didn't expect any problem. I took a lot of time to decide which CPU, GPU or CPU cooler to get, I didn't think too much when it came to the power supply. Clearly, I should have gone for something higher end like the SeaSonic you mention (which uses fans that only spin under heavy load).
It is also where most of the noise comes from, the fan is very noisy. I will change it eventually.

Boot times take a while mostly because the PC boots, then stops, then boots again. Most people with this motherboard have the same issue, I haven't found out how to correct it. It is not a huge deal but I'd rather have a PC that boots faster. On average it takes 45 seconds to reach the Desktop screen.

I'm still using Lightroom 5, perhaps Lightroom 6 would improve the overall performance as it uses the GPU for some of its tasks.
But now that you mention it, I have all my photos on the spinning hard drive. The SSD is used for the OS, some programs (including Lightroom) and my Adobe Premiere Pro sequence and files.

The plan is to change the power unit and to add another SSD but ultimately, I wonder whether money would be better spent towards buying an iMac down the road.

When you power down the PC do you turn off the power supply or do anything else that would remove all power from the system? Doing so will cause the double boot, it will soft boot to check some hardware, then restart for a normal boot. Update to the newest BIOS if it's not already updated, most people report this will fix most double boots.

If you do not have any onboard RAID enabled 45 seconds to the desktop is well beyond normal. My 4770k and 4790k systems both boot to desktop from cold start in about 15 seconds, my 5700HQ laptop will cold boot in about 10 seconds using an M.2 PCIe SSD.

As a side note Google iMac coil whine, it's not a problem limited to PC's only. A friend of mine returned two iMac's last year because of coil whine, the third was fine. Both of them had coil whine when pushing the GPU.