Mac Building for Photography?

[egparadigm]

Probably need to do more research, but I'll post the questions anyhow.

Anyone got links for support on USB 3, or is there a Hackintosh Lightning equivalent? I currently have a couple of FireWire 800 drives – would I need to buy a firewire card? (I can just hook up via USB 2 instead.)

Which piece of hardware deals with video and audio out?

[EvilBoris]

It's just on the motherboard mostly nowadays, otherwise it would be separate graphics/sound cards.

[smouty]

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

No but it handles a D3200 24MP raw file easily

I use an ATI 6670 which works OOB and was the most powerful card that required no additional power at the time.
I'm not sure if it helps with LR but QE/CI works perfectly and I use two Dell 2008 screens in LR.
A colleague built one as per the Tonymacx86 spec that Speedolita mentioned and it is a beast. Geekbench scores about 4x mine

[briareos_kerensky]

I use an ATI 6670 which works OOB and was the most powerful card that required no additional power at the time.
I'm not sure if it helps with LR but QE/CI works perfectly and I use two Dell 2008 screens in LR

OpenGL acceleration in Photoshop is a nice thing but vital. CUDA (so, nVidia cards) is supported in CS6, with OpenCL support coming in the next version, at least for video-related products (Premiere, After Effects, SpeedGrade); however if you're not using a lot of filters or Photoshop Extended's 3D controls, there's little point in thinkkign about a GPU exclusively for Photoshop.
Never used Lightroom, so I wouldn't know of OpenGL or CUDA benefits.

[Lyris]

I am mindful of that. I'm also wondering about just using windows.

I was going to say this, but didn't want to be "that guy" in a Mac thread. Is there any reason you have to use Mac OS?

From what I recall, it's got better colour profiling built into the OS (is that still true?) if you're using a probe to make sure everything's accurate, but that's not impossible on Windows either.

[Brad]

Investment in software is the main reason I guess. I will continue to argue that my PC under Mac OS runs "better" than under Windows 7 or 8. By better I mean smoother, faster (in terms of user experience, UI response) and is generally just a more pleasant experience. If I didn't game on it then I'd only use OSX mode on my PC. Don't want this to be a mac vs pc topic though! If you use Photoshop and Lightroom then A windows box will do the job admirably.

Note also that there is a limit to how fast you can overclock a hackintosh. I can only get mine to 3.5GHz I think whereas in Windows I can take it to 5GHz.

[EvilBoris]

That's what I I'd say too, I only switch to Windows for windows specific games, but I wouldn't have any issue using windows.

Lightroom is pretty clever in that you are never truly editing the original file anyway , merely a preview file. When you are done with it and you export the photo then it actually renders the changes in great detail, so you don't get any huge benefit from having a super computer. Although a snappier experience that more RAM and SSD will give is always welcome.

I've never found like room to be slow on either my old laptop running Win7 or my Mac with OSX/Win 8 on it.

If you've got a RAW file somewhere I can grab, I will pop it into Lightroom and see how it fares.

[egparadigm]

Thanks for the offer, Boris. PM incoming.