Is It Worth Purchasing a 27" iMac for LR 5 & PC CS6?

I use the same programs for my photography business and I have just purchased an iMac 27", 3.4 Ghz, 16GB ram, 1TB fusion. It absolutely flies in comparison to my old Mac Pro and is perfect for photo editing. I don't think you need the faster processor but 16GB ram is a must. You could also go full SSD but that will cost a lot more and won't be that significantly faster I think.

ADubin said:

I'm currently using a 3 year old MacBook Pro and Dell 21" monitor to process my photos using LR 5 and PS CS6. I'm looking at a new iMac 2 27" with a 3.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz and 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2X4GB to speed up my post processing. Can somebody tell me if that is correct Mac and configuration to speed up my process?

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Note that a pure SSD setup is much faster than Fusion. Fusion gets around 350MB/s read/write speeds and a pure SSD is 650/750 read/write respectively.

8GB of RAM isn't enough, you should be looking for at least 16GB of RAM. 32GB may be overkill though.

For your needs, the 3.1GHz, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD 21.5" iMac may do the job fine.

My write speed is 310 and read is 580 on 1TB Fusion, a heck of a lot faster than my spinning HD in my old Mac Pro.

phphoto said:

My write speed is 310 and read is 580 on 1TB Fusion, a heck of a lot faster than my spinning HD in my old Mac Pro.

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At any rate, Fusion is always faster than a traditional HDD. But it still can't beat a pure SSD. Especially not the 4-lane PCIe 1TB SSDs in the rMBPs, those can hit 1.2GB/s read/writes.