
Lightroom $4K iMac VS $4K PC performance test - rayshan
https://www.slrlounge.com/lightroom-mac-vs-pc-speed-test-4k-imac-vs-4k-custom-pc-performance-test/
======
danfinlay
A lot of that iMac's cost is its retina display, and you didn't bother buying
a retina display for the PC. Running a speed test is silly, there are already
major differences in the build.

To make this remotely more scientific, you'd either need to buy a 4k monitor
for the PC, or use a Mac Pro and just take the monitor out of the equation.

~~~
maxxxxx
That's true. They should have gotten a 5k screen with 5120‑by‑2880 resolution
for the PC like the Mac. This Dell costs 2000 which would have reduced the
available for the PC components. On the other hand if you don't care for such
resolution the PC may be the better choice.

~~~
bloaf
If they wanted a more apples to apples comparison in the hardware department,
they probably should have added $600 to the monitor price[1] and paid for it
by using the same CPU as the iMac (i.e. a 6700k)

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Monitor-UP2715K-27-Inch-LED-
Lit/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Monitor-UP2715K-27-Inch-LED-
Lit/dp/B00OKSFXZU)

Honestly, though, I don't think the point was to do an apples-to-apples
hardware comparison. This was on a cost basis only.

~~~
HillaryBriss
The article also leaves out the cost of their IT guy's time to assemble the
custom PC components. How much does an hour of Joseph WU's time cost? How many
hours did it take for him to order, receive, unpack, and then assemble the
components?

~~~
p1esk
My guess would be most of Wu's time was spent researching which components to
order, probably several hours. On the other hand, if he's a full time
employee, then it does not cost anything extra to have him do his job.

~~~
manicdee
If he is a full time employee then the time he spent researching and
assembling this computer was time he didn't spend doing the job he was paid
for.

~~~
oarsinsync
Unless 'researching, building and supporting the IT environment' is his job,
as their IT guy

------
pedalpete
I'm not a Apple fan, but I find most of these tests are counting seconds and
then extrapolating that to actual work time, which I don't think actually maps
as well as the author thinks.

The exception to this is 'smart previews' test which shows a 6.5 minute
difference.

I've asked the creator of fileloupe
([http://www.fileloupe.com/](http://www.fileloupe.com/)) if his app would
improve the performance of this one test. I know nothing about photos, so I
don't even know what this 'smart preview' thing is...

~~~
stcredzero
Right. His mapping it 1-to-1 implies that most of the time is bound by
computer tasks. So there would be almost no viewing/decision/input task time,
just some rapid input, then walking away from the computer.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
This is so often the flaw with business upgrades. Its much easier to blame it
on old kit than to struggle through improving workflow.

------
soared
I'm surprised by HN's response here. I always thought it was common knowledge
that a custom PC would be faster than a mac. You don't pay for speed with
Apple, you pay for user experience.

~~~
coldtea
Not just user experience, lots of things people don't immediately appreciate:
construction (e.g. unibody sturdy metal), backlit keyboards, multi-touch
trackpads, newest ports, mag safe, better battery life, thinnes, less weight,
hi-dpi high quality monitors, seamless "sleep/wake" behavior, etc -- not to
mention high resale value.

------
emehrkay
This guy managed to edit a 4k video on last years Macbook faster than a much
beefier Windows computer:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnapaZYD2cU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnapaZYD2cU)

I think that speaks to the "quality" of the software more than anything. I'm
wiling to bet that Adobe Premiere would render that macbook useless. I wonder
how much more(I can't imagine how difficult it is to write their software
cross-platform) amazing the Adobe suite would be if they only focused on
Windows (which allow for these super powered machines).

------
HillaryBriss
They could have saved some money on the iMacs by simply buying and installing
the RAM themselves. If they opted for the 8GB Apple RAM they'd take $600 off
the iMac price.

And the 1TB flash storage option they chose can also be questioned. I mean,
1TB of the iMac's internal flash storage is super expensive, but it's also WAY
WAY faster than the Samsung 850 EVO in terms of read/write times. (Samsung 850
EVO has the SATA bottleneck.) My point is that if you know your process is
constrained by CPU speed, don't put so much of your budget into fast storage.
If they had opted for the 256 GB flash storage option in the iMac they'd take
$700 off the price.

OTOH, I don't see a way around the inability to overclock the iMac's cpu.
Stuck with 4.0 GHz (or 4.2 in Turbo boost).

------
iiiggglll
> Speaking conservatively, a 25% difference in performance would turn an 8
> hour wedding edit into 10 hours.

That's only true if all 8 hours are 100% spent waiting on the machine, which
doesn't seem likely. This doesn't seem like a CPU-bound task. Most of the time
is probably spent by the human actually looking at the photos and making
decisions.

------
stegosaurus
4000USD is a lot of money. That seems like an odd setup.

Not having ever wanted to buy a machine for that amount of cash, I'd expect to
do better with multi-socket systems.

Anyone care to chime in? I struggled to spend over 1K GBP with my latest
machine. (I think 'Extreme Edition' is basically like buying the S version of
a car, mind). i7-5820K, 64GB ram.

One thing that does stick out is an odd monitor comparison. There's an
expensive color repro "low" (in comparison) res monitor for the PC, against
the standard iMac retina. Aren't there cheaper 4K monitors/TV's about?

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Lightroom has a single core CPU bottleneck, multisocket is pointless for the
this use case.

The rest is on the GPU

~~~
stegosaurus
I suspected that, but what's with the monstrous 8 core thing then? Couldn't
you equally overclock a 4 core CPU and save hundreds of dollars?

Basically, is the whole article just nonsense? :)

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Absolute nonsense.

This stinks of a cross between attempting to do PR and having someone who
didn't make a spending decision justify it.

As I said elsewhere, the place to improve is in their human workflows, or
there is no improvement to get.

------
feld
These comparisons are silly. Now imagine it's a BMW vs someone's project car
both with the same $$$ invested.

Yeah, the project car will probably smoke it. But not everyone wants a project
car.

~~~
ben174
They should be doing this test against a Mac Pro if they want a fair
comparison. And yes, the Mac Pro would likely be more expensive, but I don't
think it's a surprise to anyone that building your own overclocked PC is
cheaper.

~~~
bane
Why would it necessarily be cheaper? After all Apple has both economy of scale
and the capacity to buy up the entire manufacturing run of many of the
components. They _should_ be able to assemble a system as tightly integrated
as a Mac much cheaper than somebody could go out and buy all the parts for.

A better example might be the cost delta between buying a car from the
manufacturer and buying all the parts to make the same car separately and
putting it together. The direct from manufacturer car will be far cheaper.

~~~
omonra
Apple probably doesn't 'get out of bed' for a profit margin smaller than X%.

That number is probably an order of magnitude higher than the profit margin of
component makers.

------
juandazapata
I wonder what would be the test results if they used a 4k display in Windows
as well. Moving those many pixels has an extra cost.

Other than that, I find the review centered around their use case and well
explained. Well done.

~~~
tracker1
The video card in question should handle it without issue...

------
musesum
Final Thoughts > "... Apple is simply adding new products and updating product
lines often times without much thought it seems. This can be seen in the
horrid pen solution found in the iPad Pro where charging it requires you to
have a spear sticking out of your iPad."

The above seem like a non-sequitur, but seems apt. I switched from Windows to
OSX in 2007 to work exclusively on iOS. In the past year: I abandoned WatchOS
due to artificial constraints, discovered that the Apple Pencil has an
annoying skid/squeak, and an Auto-update from Xcode 7.2 to 7.3 broke my C++
toolchain. The last, of which, Apple QA has decided not to fix, even though XC
4 thru 7.2 worked just fine. Meanwhile, can't run Cuda on my year old MBP AMD
Chipset. I may be switching platforms. Hence the interest in OP's article,
including the tangental Final Thoughts.

~~~
tracker1
I bought my current rMBP in late 2014, and it may well be my last Apple
product... I've mainly been a fan because of the ootb unix support, and the
touchpad (that's a huge deal for me). The screens are nice too, but others
have caught up, and I can't see detail that well anymore.

The SMB/CIFS change from samba is what caught me, that was kind of painful. I
finally upgraded to El Capitan, and not sure I like it much better. For the
most part, OSX is the one that stands out in terms of how I use my computer...
Ubuntu and Windows are closer to each other (with bash) than OSX, and once
windows has native Linux subsystem in general availability, I may wind up
using it more.

------
wmccullough
This is a qualitative analysis at best. I live in both the PC and Mac world
and I'll say this, Some of what you pay apple for is quality. I understand
that many cannot fathom this, but their customer service net promoter score is
very admirable. You get a quality machine. Style does matter, and you get
style with a Mac as well. If style isn't important, explain to me why builders
spend hours deciding on cases, lighting, and cable management. At the end of
the day, these types of comparisons aren't going to sway anyone.

------
kylec
Of _course_ a purpose-built PC will outperform an iMac, dollar for dollar.
That's not exactly news. The iMac also has a severe price-to-performance
disadvantage here by including an expensive 5K panel, while the PC is tested
with a much cheaper 2560x1440 monitor.

However, the disappointing thing to me here is that you can't reach
performance parity with the iMac by throwing more money at it. The iMac tested
here is a completely maxed out machine.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Yes!

The Skylake processor in the iMac is something the end user cannot overclock
(without doing something extreme). And none of the Mac Pro cores are as fast.
And Apple doesn't water cool their machines. They simply don't offer robust
overclocking options to us. So, for a single-core, the 4.0 GHz Skylake in the
iMac is the fastest thing Apple offers.

If there is an underlying, valid core criticism in this article, it's the same
one everybody already knows about: Apple doesn't offer their end users a truly
competitive array of system configurations. Instead, they force their users
into carefully defined and limited product tiers, each one costing
significantly more than the last.

------
ankushnarula
Apple is delivering a turnkey hardware solution with the 5K iMac. They will
also provide an upgrade path with future hardware generations. This article is
the same-ole myopic view of DIY specifications and IT enterprise management.
Macs are not built for people who can or want to do it themselves. Macs are
built for people who ONLY want to focus on the task at hand.

------
r-w
Surprise, surprise. A custom-built, overclocked machine with more of its cost
invested in its CPU was faster than one that wasn’t overclocked and is sold
for looks and stability over raw performance. It’s not like the choice of
almost all the components had absolutely no impact on the final result.

------
ykamakazi
Isn't this more a test of lightroom's performance on a mac vs a PC ? May not
really indicate the performance difference between the two.

------
imaginenore
$630 for the graphics card is a waste of money for Lightroom.

Should have spent it on PCIe SSD or Xeon CPU.

~~~
tracker1
I don't think you'll get higher single core speeds on a Xeon...

~~~
imaginenore
Some operations is Light room scale rather well with the number of cores, and
some do beyond 8 cores.

------
ryan-allen
I haven't looked at it yet but I'm putting my money on the 4K PC kicking the
crap out of the Mac, unless the screen kills the PC budget...

EDIT: Yep, for what it's worth, if you are doing retouch for print, pro
studios use EIZO screens and they are usually around 2k-3k+ per unit.

------
phonon
The PC system is overclocked 50%! What a pointless article.

------
joshka
That spec iMac is currently $3879 at MacMall [1], To save money, you could
easily spec a 4.0GHz/8GB/1TB FUS/M390 for $2299 from B&H [3], add the same SSD
($300) and ram from OWC ($328 for 32GB / $667 for 64GB). Bringing the total to
$3266. We also need to go to a 5K 27 inch monitor on the PC side for a fair
price comparison; the cheapest I could find was $1042 HP Z27q [4]. Add $42 to
the PC price to make up for this.

Now, the PC price comes out to $4370+42=$4412, so we need to drop $1146 of
from the PC to get a realistic price comparison. The RAM, Screen, SSD, and
graphics card are anchored due to our Apples to Not Apples comparison. That
leaves the motherboard, case, CPU, power supply and water cooler to drop in
price.

I don't know water cooling particularly well, but lets say we leave that in to
continue overclocking the CPU, but drop to a lesser model, same with the Power
Supply and Case. So revised budget for each is:

Case: $125 -> $80 Power Supply: $140 -> $80 Water cooling: $120 -> $80

Now a gaming motherboard was selected because it's stable for overclocking,
but let's throw caution to the wind and drop our budget to half that and hope
it still overclocks stable. $480 -> $240

That leaves $261 for the CPU, which buys an i5-6600K (3.5GHz), or we drop the
water cooling and run everything at stock to get to an i7-6700K (4GHz). In
other words, the same processor in the iMac. If this benchmarks any
differently, it's the Lightroom developers fault, not the hardware.

So, the upshot is, spending the same amount on a Mac will get you the same
specs in a much better looking equivalent device.

[1]
[http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~13697228~pdp.jhffibb?s...](http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~13697228~pdp.jhffibb?source=APPLEINSIDER02)

[2]
[http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd...](http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd_mk47218_bh_27_imac_with_retina.html)

[3]
[http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd...](http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1190421-REG/apple_z0sd_mk47218_bh_27_imac_with_retina.html)

[4]
[http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=11429...](http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=1142990&gclid=CMmWqobdrMwCFYo2gQodE6ACrg&Q=&ap=y&m=Y&c3api=1876%2C92051677802%2C&is=REG&A=details)

------
SiddelBlythe
if you buy apple, you pay the extra tax, and the anodized aluminum finish.

~~~
glibgil
And the aluminum body connected to that finish. Why not say the tax is for
sturdy, light, consistent (if not attractive) construction?

------
batbomb
60 hours is easily lost when some piece on your custom rig dies and you don't
have apple care.

~~~
soared
From the article:

"The honest truth is, I have spent just as much time in a Apple store at the
Genius Counter getting my Apple machines repaired as I have maintaining my
well built PCs."

~~~
joshvm
Apple Care does take sweet time, but you don't need to go to the store.
They'll pick your machine up by courier to fix, at least they did for my iMac
when the hard drive died.

