5K Imac retina

Dwig said:
So true...

... at work our end results are photographs printed on canvas at rather large sizes (~20x30" to 40x60 are the common sizes with some prints even larger). I use a MacPro (c2009, 8-core, 12gb RAM, FW800 drives) and have to struggle to geld the display's gamut (its a contemporary Cinema Display) to get a reasonably preview of the final printed result.

We'll be replacing this "antique" system with something newer, probably next spring, and I'm considering a basic MacPro and a fully blown iMac 27", likely this new 5k model. Whatever we go with, reigning in the monitor's "beautiful" display will be the bane of my existence for a few days or weeks.

The antique MacPro is becoming a limiting factor. It's performance is sluggish compared to my personal off-the-shelf Dell XPS8700. While the Dell's 4-core i7 is faster, based on benchmarking, than the dual 4-core chips (8 cores total) in the MacPro, it has less RAM (8gb vs 12gb). The biggest difference though is the HD speed. Opening and saving 500mb-2gb image files (common sizes for us) in Photoshop takes 2-3 times as long on the MacPro as it does on the Dell. Also, basic RAW conversion of our Nikon D800 files in LR is more sluggish on the MacPro than on the Dell. It's time for a full replacement Mac system, incremental updates (new faster internal drive, ...) would be too much effort for too little gain, especially with 5 year old harware that runs 8-10hrs per day, 7 days a week.
Click to expand...


I wonder why opening and saving files is slower on the Mac? It seems like the Hard Drives themselves would be the limiting factor, not anything in the Mac's hardware. Do you have SSD drives in your new Dell?

My son and I built him a Windows system with a 4-core Intel processor last year. I've been meaning to compare its performance with Photoshop to my 2008 Mac Pro with dual 4-core 2.8ghz processors, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
 
I'm still gaga over this thing, and one thing that's really sweet is flickr, which seems to rise to the resoultion both on the site, and with links in the threads. If the sharpness is there to begin with, anyway.

Lightroom is a bit squirrely, sometimes fast, other times thinking in simple actions. This behavior has been noted in multiple configurations by other users.

I have a feeling there may be some updates to LR to make it more consitent with the multiple resolutions which appear simualtaneously in the "best for retina" mode.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
I wonder why opening and saving files is slower on the Mac? It seems like the Hard Drives themselves would be the limiting factor, not anything in the Mac's hardware. Do you have SSD drives in your new Dell?
Click to expand...

No SSDs in the Dell, but the Dell's HD subsystem (drive and controller) are 4 years newer than that of the MacPro I'm using. I don't have the exact specs at hand, but I'm sure it's the old MacPro's HD subsystem that is the root cause. Given the age of the MacPro and the expense ($ cost, time out of service, and potential unreliability of an older system) of upgrading the MacPro's HD subsystem makes any upgrade a poor choice.
 
photomoof said:
Well I was about to live on with my Cinema display, and just buy a new Mini, but your review has again unsettled me and perhaps will just go for the stock iMac.

Thanks for you review, fun and practical!! 🙂
Click to expand...

If you can afford it, the upgraded processor and video card are well worth considering as they are difficult or impossible to change in the future and you're going to be driving a 5K display. I believe the processor is technically upgradable, but might void the warranty in the process.
 
^ Yes, I understand that the CPU is socketed, not soldered in. But to get to it you peel the screen off... it's glued on so there's a problem in reassembly!

Mine came last Friday, with the faster CPU and GPU... Just lovely! 😀
 
Doug said:
...Mine came last Friday, with the faster CPU and GPU... Just lovely! 😀
Click to expand...
...Except that it declined connect to the internet, though all the settings appeared correct. This is apparently an issue that was fixed in OS X 10.10.1 but bit me. As I understand it, this is also connected with having used Migration Assistant to move over files from a previous Mac's Time Machine backup.

After a lot of time reinstalling the OS, and other thrashing about, I got the drive erased and everything updated and installed. This is very likely more than a non-technical person would put up with (engineering background + 30 years with Macs). :bang: And I admire the ability of Apple Support personnel to handle stuff like this blind over the phone. Logged on now with the new iMac...

Doug
 
Doug said:
...Except that it declined connect to the internet, though all the settings appeared correct. This is apparently an issue that was fixed in OS X 10.10.1 but bit me. As I understand it, this is also connected with having used Migration Assistant to move over files from a previous Mac's Time Machine backup...
Click to expand...

I've seen reports of this problem with the release of Yosemite, but so far it hasn't hit me at all. I've updated eight different machines in all the different ways possible, multiple times, and haven't been caught out by it yet. Just lucky, I guess!

G
 
Was it the migration or the move to Yosemite from Mavericks that caused the issue?


I've loaded Yosemite on my mba 11" without any trouble.
I have been waiting on my iMac to see what bugs or HW/Driver incompatibility issues if any pop up.
It's running Mavericks.

Thanks
 
Andy, as I understand it, this is a bug in OS X 10.10 Yosemite (fixed in 10.10.1) that may be triggered by the way Migration Assistant brings in the Time Machine files. My new iMac came with the original Yosemite 10.10 installed. In my case it happens that the Time Machine files were from a Mac running OS X 10.9 Mavericks, don't know if that's significant.

Booting into the Recovery Partition (Cmd-R during startup) gives access to a copy of Safari browser there, and it connected to the internet just fine. Also, I made a new 200Gb partition on the hard drive and installed a fresh 10.10 on it, and that too connected to the internet fine. So the problem was not hardware-related, and not out beyond the computer itself... clearly an internal software matter... only on the main partition with files migrated from a Mavericks Time Machine backup.

I don't think there will be any problem upgrading to Yosemite from a Mavericks machine, as there's no Time Machine migration component to the process. I did this Mavericks -> Yosemite upgrade on my MacBook Pro about a month ago as a test and it's been smooth and stable.
 
Thanks Doug! You answered my question and more.
I'll probably Load this iMac with Yosemite this weekend. After using it since for a while now on the laptop.. I see no reason not to. 🙂
 
New iMac is running fine and fast under OS X 10.10.1! Yesterday I pulled the two 8Gb DIMM memory cards out of the 2009 iMac and reinstalled two original 2Gb cards to put it back from 24Gb to 12 for my wife's use. The two 8Gb cards were over-specced for the old iMac, but just right for the new. These then went into the two empty memory slots of the new 2014 iMac to max it out at 32Gb. I did not electrocute myself or fry either of the Macs, so all is good!

Performance is fast, for the most part, as in launching applications, probably largely due to the hybrid SSD/HD Fusion drive. Performance within applications is a bit of a mix of faster and just the same. It could well be that the apps need upgrades to take full advantage of the hardware.

Lightroom 5.7 runs faster in general, such as launching and tool selection and use, but I get slow-downs when moving from one image in the filmstrip to another, and scaling the view. Beachball!

I use the shareware GraphicConverter program to open the full-scale TIFFs exported from LR for scaling, sharpening, and conversion to JPEG. It's running pretty peppy, about as before, with a certain delay when scaling as before.

Backups are complete, both a clone and a TimeMachine backup, the MacBook Pro has been mounted as a Target and data transferred over Firewire, so getting assurances that all is working as it should. BTW, the Firewire is via Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter cable, as the new iMac has no native Firewire. I could use a Thunderbolt cable for this transfer of weekly updated files, but I don't really need that speed. WiFi is too slow, though!

The 2009 iMac 27 is also a Build-to-Order model with the 2.8GHz quad-core i7 processor, and my wife is looking forward to having that on her desk to replace a slightly earlier 2009 iMac 24 and her "ancient" 17 inch melon iMac. We sort of alternate in taking hand-me-down gear from each other!

Oh, and in prepping the 2009 iMac 27 for her, I will boot from its Recovery Partition, use the Disk Utility there to erase my content from the rest of the drive, reformat, and install a fresh copy of the OS X downloaded from Apple. I find that this will be the same "Mavericks" 10.09.5 version that's running the Recovery Partition, not the latest "Yosemite" and that's fine. Could update to Yosemite then or later at my wife's option.
 
Can anyone comment on

(1) Using SSD in the machine and a Thunderbolt drive for cache/documents
(2) Whether the 4Gb of VRAM is worth it?

Thanks!
Dante
 
Been loving mine for several weeks now... Very satisfied! It's stupid fast, and easily able to keep up with me (unlike my aging Mac Pro which was decidedly slower by an order of magnitude).

I've added third-party RAM to max it out at 32GB and added a G-Technology G-RAID Studio (2x4TB drives = 4TB RAID 1/mirror) for storage, which is connected via Thunderbolt 2. Very speedy; 360MB/s is no problem. I keep the OS and apps on the internal (pure, not Fusion) SSD for maximum speed, along with the primary Lightroom catalog (backups on the RAID).

I went with the better graphics card; Mac OS X utilizes every bit of the GPU generally, so I felt it was worthwhile. Especially since you can't change it after the fact.

If I had ONE gripe (and it's the only one) it's that in apps like Photoshop, editing images for a website that have say, a horizontal resolution of a "paltry" 600px... They're downright tiny to work with! Of course they display normally in a browser. But to get around that I created a keyboard shortcut for 200% zoom. It works!

Finally, editing images at 100% on the screen is insanely awesome. 😀
 
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