How to gauge if a new iMac is gonna REALLY help for PhotoLab

Hi All,

Today, I have a late 2014 i7 iMac with 16GB. I’m hoping to try and assess what a newer iMac, perhaps the iMac Pro might do for me with PhotoLab. Especially interested in the speed of NR PRIME exports, as that is taking a ~1.5-2 minutes per image on my current iMac.

Any thoughts in terms of what I’d gain with a newer model? Of course, I KNOW it’d be faster, but where do you get the most “bang for your buck” with PhotoLab? More cores? More memory?

Thanks!

  • Jon

Hi Jon … My rig: MB Pro mid 2015 2.8 GHz I7 w/ 16 GB, Sierra, 1 TB SSD.

Full size NEF (6018x4016) on battery power:

w/ PRIME NR: 66 secs
w/o PRIME NR: 13 secs

Not sure if your 2014 has an SSD but when I moved up from a rotating HDD I noticed an immediate improvement. The four cores really helps too (which I see you have).

In this particular case, I don’t think memory will help a lot – it’s parallel processing and HDD write speed you need. I am running w/ a 4GB virtual disk out of that 16 and while PRIME NR exports are noticeably slower, they aren’t painful.

Hi RexBlock,

Thanks for the info. I was wondering about memory. Good to know that that’s not the bottleneck.

I think my short term solution is using multiple computers when I have a large amount of PRIME photos to output… :slight_smile:

  • Jon