IMac?

mata.morrison

mata.morrison

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Matthew
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Looking at getting a newer editing desktop, at the moment I'm running a q9550 with 6gig of ram. It serves its propose for Light room.

Seen some late 2009 27" imacs for around £600. Core2 Duo Processors etc

His would they cope with Light room?
 
I have a late 2009 27" iMac with 12GB of ram and honestly, sometimes it does struggle a bit with Lightroom.
 
I agree it's the processor but the ram does get completely eaten up (e.g. when generating smart previews).
 
It'll be OK for the very basic stuff, but as soon as you start using a brush it will get jerky.
 
I'd opt for a late 2009 iMac. This is when they installed the Quad core i5 and i7 processors. Much much faster than the core duo machines.

The basic model came with 4 GB of RAM but you can update this easily. My 2009 has 12Gb and is fine. Mine is still running fine for apps such as Lightroom and Photoshop. Final Cut is the only one that seems to be bit slow when output rendering, But that is a bit of serious heavy duty lifting for the machine. Plus it happily runs all the latest OS's
 
Last edited:
neil_g said:
must be a mac version thing, LR3-5 never raised(s) its head about 2.5gb RAM usage on Win7. CPU and disk activity however are key performance impact areas.
Click to expand...

Maybe it is, because I'm sure my Macbook would get down to less than a 100Mb out of 4Gb sometimes (and practically stop too).
 
Even if you get 4Gb of memory on the Mac updating to 8Gb is not expensive 2 x 4Gb of DDR3 memory from Crucial is around £45 depending on the option you go for.

I ran my Mac with 8Gb for a few years and never encountered any real problems, even running with Lightroom and Photoshop at the same time. I would think though at 4Gb this may put some strain on the system with multiple apps open. I don't remember however having any real concerns with my 2008 MacBook Pro with 4Gb and core 2 processor. But then I think image file sizes were only half of what they are today
 
Apple have an event on 16 September where it is rumoured there are going to be new product announcements ( Primarily iPhone 6 ) Might be worth waiting till then if you can to see if they update the mini.

Be nice if the announced a 3+GHz machine with SSD and upgradable memory. Sort of mini Mac Pro :)

If you cant and want an iMac then defiantly go for an i5. You'll be disappointed with the slower machine
 
I do love a mac, iMacs are beautiful, only trouble is when you want to upgrade to a new computer the screen is redundant.... I'm personally wither look at the new Mac mini, if it's ever released or a MacBook Pro and a decent monitor, many show 99% adobe RGB. I don't think the iMacs show that much. Then if you upgrade you still have a decent monitor. Just my twopeenth.

Saying that if a decent iMac came along at a good price, I'd probably get it :-/
 
I wouldn't buy a 5-year old 27" iMac. The first thing that went wrong would be ruinously expensive, and unless your idea of fun is handling an expensive 27" piece of glass using suckers, will require a third party to do the work. If you're on a budget, you want to be able to fix things, piecemeal, yourself, at the lowest possible cost.

That means a PC.
 
That version (2009 you are considering) before the latest thin edged design suffers hugely with getting damn hot. I had a few related failures... Optical drive, screen and HDDs being the big ones!
I updated to the later/current design with SSD and it's a totally different animal... Fast as you like and stone cold flat out
I wouldn't buy one of the previous models myself
 
mines a 2010 running mavericks with a 3.6 ghz intel core i5 and 8gb of DDR3 ,handles cs6 no problem ,i don't use lightroom though
 
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