Lightroom Mac Speed Test with Custom PC

Spoiler alert: the custom PC consistently out-performed the Apple iMac! Videoguys Tech Select HP z Workstations are amazing performance work-horses, customized especially for video and film editing. Check them out here.

LIGHTROOM MAC VS PC SPEED TEST | $4K IMAC VS $4K CUSTOM PC PERFORMANCE TEST SLRLounge.com

Our studio has grown to a point where our IT demands are quite heavy. We not only need powerful machines, but we are finding that building and servicing those machines is becoming quite costly. So, I wanted to do another Mac vs PC test to see if we could purchase pre-built Apple computers that can compete in terms of performance and price with our custom PCs which have been built by our own internal IT guru Joseph Wu. This article documents the results.

TESTING APPROACH

It is within Adobe Lightroom that our studio spends the majority of time, thus, Lightroom is, and will be, the focus of our testing. For a studio processing millions of images each year, image-to-image speed is absolutely paramount, so we optimize to suit. While we are testing for a larger/higher output studio than most, our testing methodology is based on budget, and we wanted to see how two similarly priced machines fair against one another. Prices listed are continually fluctuating and subject to change, but dollar amounts represented here were accurate at the time of purchase/build....[continue reading]