Mac Building for Photography?

[egparadigm]

Hi All,

Having now started using a Nikon D800, my poor old white '08 Macbook can barely cope. I am therefore thinking of building a Hackintosh, based on tonymacx86 guides.

I use Lightroom mainly and, when called for, Photoshop. I also use a little InDesign as I design my own photography books and also use a fair helping of Word.

What components should I invest the main part of my spend in, given my priorities? RAM? Video card? Processor?

Many thanks for any guidance.

[Brad]

RAM!

Building a hackintosh is difficult and maintaining one is tricky. Saves you a thousand pound or so but there is a price to pay.

[egparadigm]

I am mindful of that. I'm also wondering about just using windows. I cannot afford another mac at this time. I'm also mindful that I may get new hardware if I pick up postgraduate study options in the next few years. At least with a self build I can choose to change the OS should I wish for a simpler life.

[briareos_kerensky]

I want to go the Macintosh way, you can buy a baseline Mac and then search for extra RAM by third-party vendors. Baseline Macs aren't that much expensive compared to similar WIntel machines but extra RAM or HDDs are what usually make those computers darn expensive.

Aside from that, FSW is right about the RAM, but even with huge amounts, Photoshop and Indesign absolutely love to swap, so a second hard drive will work wonders, especially if you launch multiple programs at once and/or limit RAM usage in a program's option panel.

[smouty]

I used a Dell 755 which is a bit old being C2Q based but is more than enough for Lightroom so anything later will be fine.
I'd go for an i5 with 8gb, an SSD and a regular HDD for data.
I would recommend a NAS or server that can work as a Timecapsule to make recovery easy not that I've needed it yet.

[speedlolita]

3570k, 16GB RAM, 2TB HDD, 128GB SSD and all the other bits shouldn't run you up too much.

I trust you have a professional display too? No point editing photos without one of those. Love my U2410, better options now though!

[Brad]

A base tower mac is massively more expensive than an intel pc. The apple equivalent of my ?700 pc is ?2.5k

It really is borderline whether it's worth the effort imo because a system update can kill your system, giving a kernel panic on boot. Then you find not all your usb ports work. Same with your gfx card ports etc. You end up needing a spare drive to do a carbon copy cloner backup before you dare change anything lol.

[egparadigm]

Yeah, I have an HP LP2475w. Aside from the new D800 filesize my Macbook has done a standup job.

Smouty, out of interest have you tried a 36MP raw file on such a setup?

My current Macbook is 2.4GHz dual core/4GB RAM.

[Brad]

I have an air 2.1ghz 4gb ram 250gb ssd. I love it. However my 4.8ghz quad core 8gb ssd hackintosh utterly destroys it. Such a joy to use

[EvilBoris]

I use Lightroom quite extensively for my photos , I couldn't see any advantage to the mac version when I switched to it (except for the screen res on the mbpr.

I've got one with 16gb of ram and SSD. The file sizes from my 6D can be as high as 42mb and I never saw either my 2009 windows laptop or the mbpr struggle unless I have the file open in photoshop at the same time.

[egparadigm]

3570k, 16GB RAM, 2TB HDD, 128GB SSD and all the other bits shouldn't run you up too much.

So, perhaps Tony's MacMini Deluxe?

Is it worth getting a graphics card at all? It's listed as optional. I suppose I can always buy one later down the road if I decide I need to get my game or somesuch.

^Boris: the D800 files are 75MB!

[EvilBoris]

Lightroom 4 doesn't actually make use of the GPU at all, so maybe that's one for the future?

[speedlolita]

No point in a GPU I think. At least not for photo editing. Plus the Intel HD4000 on the 3570k is pretty nifty.

[egparadigm]

Cheers, guys. Can always rely on a swift response. I often go to the lengths of asking in specialist forums and find the answer here first!

[Brad]

Yep. I agree with all the advice given FWIW.