# Photo editing on a Mac Mini



## MikeFromMesa (Oct 10, 2015)

I currently work on a 15" MacBook Pro Retina, 2.7GHz i7, 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, NVIDIA M650 video card with 1GB of memory running El Capitan and find LR6 runs very quickly on this machine with OpenCL turned on or off and ran just as quickly on Yosemite.


For a variety of reasons I may be replacing my MBP soon and have been trying to decide between replacing it with a Mac Mini (3.0GHz i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB Fusion drive, Intel IRIS graphics) and a 21/27" iMac (i7, 16GB RAM, 1 TB Fusion drive, separate video cards). Photo editing using LR (and using Photoshop CS5.1 or Affinity Photo as an external editor) is probably one of the most processor intensive things that I do on my system along with running iMovie and I was wondering if anyone on this forum is running a similar configuration to any of the above.


I am sure that either the 21" or 27" iMacs would be faster than my current MBP but the Apple people keep telling me that the new Mini would be just as fast even though the Mini i7 chips are only dual core rather than the quad core in my MBP and even though there is no separate graphics card. I am not hardware knowledgeable enough to know if what they are telling me is true or not but they said that the faster chip speed of the new i7 in the Mini makes up for the fewer cores in the i7 (dual rather than quad) and that most photo editing software does not take advantage of multi-threading. I do not remember seeing any settings in the LR6 Preferences Page asking me about how many threads to use so perhaps they are right about LR (although some of my software, like Dxo Optics Pro, specifically asks me about how many threads to dedicate to batch processing). Both i7 chips are capable of hyper-threading.


Before I order the Mini I thought I would ask people who might actually use that configuration their opinions. Is the Mini configured as above capable of doing photo processing quickly? Or is it too slow and underpowered? I would be using a 24" Dell UltraSharp as my external monitor. I do not know if OpenCL runs on a Mac Mini or if that would make any real difference in photo editing. I do not even know if the Mini Intel IRIS graphics is a separate graphics card or if it is on-board processing. I do some external editing using Affinity Photo, some Topaz plugins and occasionally Dxo ViewPoint 2 for keystoning but the workflow editing probably constitutes about 75% of my photo editing. I do no computer gaming.


I would appreciate any information I can get. Thank you in advance.


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## clee01l (Oct 10, 2015)

I would opt for the quad core anyway.  LR makes good use of every core available so the more the better.  I can see a speed difference between my iMac (quad Core 16GB) and my rMBP (dual core 8GB).  I attribute it to the quad cores not the additional RAM.


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## MikeFromMesa (Oct 11, 2015)

clee01l said:


> I would opt for the quad core anyway.  LR makes good use of every core available so the more the better.  I can see a speed difference between my iMac (quad Core 16GB) and my rMBP (dual core 8GB).  I attribute it to the quad cores not the additional RAM.


Thank you for your response. Your experience confirms what I suspected was probably the truth. The Mini, with only a dual core chip, just is not powerful enough to hold its own against a MBP Retina with an i7 quad core chip. I suspect I must remove the Mini from my list of possible choices.

Again, thank you for your help.


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 11, 2015)

Hi Mike. Yeah, I'd agree with Clee.  I have the slightly older quad core mini, before they dropped to dual core, and the new 27" iMac (which replaced my 15" MBP of the same spec as yours).  The iMac is blazing fast and I wouldn't part with it!

If you want the geeky answer, check out the 64-bit Multi-Core results for the machines here: http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks


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## MikeFromMesa (Oct 11, 2015)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Hi Mike. Yeah, I'd agree with Clee.  I have the slightly older quad core mini, before they dropped to dual core, and the new 27" iMac (which replaced my 15" MBP of the same spec as yours).  The iMac is blazing fast and I wouldn't part with it!
> 
> If you want the geeky answer, check out the 64-bit Multi-Core results for the machines here: http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks


Thank you. The "geeky answer" was extremely helpful in showing me how the iMac compares to the Mac Pro in the multi-core tests. Apparently the iMac is a really fast machine and it seems to be a bit faster than the Mac Pro version with only 4 cores.

On top of that the Mac Rumors site is recommending that people not buy the Pro at this time as they expect it to be updated within the next couple of months. Interesting.


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