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Late '15 iMac 5k fan noise with Adobe LR CC

H

HalfOnWhole

macrumors member
Original poster
May 23, 2011
75
29
Been using my new iMac 5k i7 m395 1TB-SSD 16GB-RAM for about a week now and generally it's great. Very fast and of course incredible screen. Speakers sound a little tinny, but that's neither here nor there.

I use the machine primarily for photo work. I spend the most time in Lightroom CC editing Sony A7Rii Raw files. As I suspected (thanks to MacRumors threads), it stutters a bit while performing various tasks in LR. Rapid cropping, brush tool, spot removal and a couple of the sliders are the bulk of said tasks. Not ideal, but whatever. Hopefully Adobe can sort that out in an update. I don't expect my machine to handle all these pixels better with age.

The fan is what surprises me, though. It ramps up pretty quickly in LR and sometimes without having editing for too long. Am I alone? I suspect not, but I am indeed curious. My old 2010 iMac very rarely ramped up its fan--never in LR that I can recall.
 
Wait, what?

I'm spending 3.000 bucks for the same type of usage and to have performance issues?. Did you read something similar from other people?

Do you have GPU acceleration on?
 
alexxk said:
Wait, what?

I'm spending 3.000 bucks for the same type of usage and to have performance issues?. Did you read something similar from other people?

Do you have GPU acceleration on?
Click to expand...
I have read similar from others who got machines right after launch. HardwRe acceleration is on too. I hope Adobe can sort this out somehow. I'm guessing doing similar editing in Photos would probably be smoother. Perhaps I'll try.
 
Hmm. I completely SMASH lightroom as a wedding photographer and at no point did my temps even get above 60c, let alone close to getting the fan going. Heck at the same time I'm running vlc in the corner of my screen playing season 5 of the Office, this rig handles all that without a sweat. There might be something abnormal with your setup, maybe hardware acceleration is disabled? Only difference you and I have is I have the m395x (cuz I'm already spending 3 grand, what's another 250?). Works amazing for me.

OH I'm on lightroom 5, perhaps your CC needs an update? I assume you have everything all updated including osx yes?
 
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iemcj said:
Hmm. I completely SMASH lightroom as a wedding photographer and at no point did my temps even get above 60c, let alone close to getting the fan going. Heck at the same time I'm running vlc in the corner of my screen playing season 5 of the Office, this rig handles all that without a sweat. There might be something abnormal with your setup, maybe hardware acceleration is disabled? Only difference you and I have is I have the m395x (cuz I'm already spending 3 grand, what's another 250?). Works amazing for me.

OH I'm on lightroom 5, perhaps your CC needs an update? I assume you have everything all updated including osx yes?
Click to expand...
Hmm i wonder. Does fan become audible? Which stat monitor do you recommend?
 
HalfOnWhole said:
Been using my new iMac 5k i7 m395 1TB-SSD 16GB-RAM for about a week now and generally it's great. Very fast and of course incredible screen. Speakers sound a little tinny, but that's neither here nor there.

I use the machine primarily for photo work. I spend the most time in Lightroom CC editing Sony A7Rii Raw files. As I suspected (thanks to MacRumors threads), it stutters a bit while performing various tasks in LR. Rapid cropping, brush tool, spot removal and a couple of the sliders are the bulk of said tasks. Not ideal, but whatever. Hopefully Adobe can sort that out in an update. I don't expect my machine to handle all these pixels better with age.

The fan is what surprises me, though. It ramps up pretty quickly in LR and sometimes without having editing for too long. Am I alone? I suspect not, but I am indeed curious. My old 2010 iMac very rarely ramped up its fan--never in LR that I can recall.
Click to expand...
I have i5 w/ m395. I use LR CC regularly but never notice the fan noise. (I only notice the fan noise when playing 3D games). Tasks are generally very fast. (The one exception is that it can be slow to continuously browse the library for the first time after importing.) Probably because I am dealing with 16MP raw file instead of 24MP?
 
I'm actually getting this exact config delivered tomorrow. I don't use Lightroom personally but I do use Premiere and am curious to know how the M395 vs the M395x compares in terms of heat. A lot of tests have been made using the M395x but I'm afraid that the M395 may run a little hotter as it doesn't have as much VRAM meaning it has to work harder.
 
HalfOnWhole said:
Hmm i wonder. Does fan become audible? Which stat monitor do you recommend?
Click to expand...
Heat never goes over 65c, fan doesn't make any noise at all. When I pause my tv shows, the only sound in the room is the ticking of my clock, a faint hum of my UPS, and an occasional "working" sound from my 10tb raid storage drives I have hooked up through the thunderbolt 2 port. Even towards the end of doing a large lightroom export.

And everyone STOP WORRYING ABOUT HEAT! There have been MULTIPLE youtube videos of guys completely proving that heat is no longer an issue here, the 2014 imac had a lot of problems with it but this years upgrade to skylake has drastically reduced any potential overheat. There's videos of guys doing crazy things to try to engage thermal throttling and none have been able to do it. So relax, you're not going to overheat your imac with any of these setups, those days are over (unless you get a defect)

Edit, the stat monitor I have used up till now is SMC fan control. Has a little thing up by the wifi bar that shows current temp and fan rpm. You can manually increase the fan speeds in your macbook pro, imac, or whatever. It's pretty lightweight too so I like it. Don't need it on the new imac but I have it installed anyway just in case haha
 
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Hmm interesting. I hate to witch hunt, but definitely don't want to live with any kind of defect. I'll try fan app.

Also, may have to do with my files. Im primarily editing 42 mp raws...but I feel as if it's happened with my 24mp raws too.
 
iemcj said:
Heat never goes over 65c, fan doesn't make any noise at all. When I pause my tv shows, the only sound in the room is the ticking of my clock, a faint hum of my UPS, and an occasional "working" sound from my 10tb raid storage drives I have hooked up through the thunderbolt 2 port. Even towards the end of doing a large lightroom export.

And everyone STOP WORRYING ABOUT HEAT! There have been MULTIPLE youtube videos of guys completely proving that heat is no longer an issue here, the 2014 imac had a lot of problems with it but this years upgrade to skylake has drastically reduced any potential overheat. There's videos of guys doing crazy things to try to engage thermal throttling and none have been able to do it. So relax, you're not going to overheat your imac with any of these setups, those days are over (unless you get a defect)

Edit, the stat monitor I have used up till now is SMC fan control. Has a little thing up by the wifi bar that shows current temp and fan rpm. You can manually increase the fan speeds in your macbook pro, imac, or whatever. It's pretty lightweight too so I like it. Don't need it on the new imac but I have it installed anyway just in case haha
Click to expand...

Do you have links to those videos? Thanks.
 
Have a few in my history so this one should work.

(I considered rick rolling you but I try to be a nice guy when it comes to computer purchases haha)
 
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HalfOnWhole said:
Been using my new iMac 5k i7 m395 1TB-SSD 16GB-RAM for about a week now and generally it's great. Very fast and of course incredible screen. Speakers sound a little tinny, but that's neither here nor there.

I use the machine primarily for photo work. I spend the most time in Lightroom CC editing Sony A7Rii Raw files. As I suspected (thanks to MacRumors threads), it stutters a bit while performing various tasks in LR. Rapid cropping, brush tool, spot removal and a couple of the sliders are the bulk of said tasks. Not ideal, but whatever. Hopefully Adobe can sort that out in an update. I don't expect my machine to handle all these pixels better with age.

The fan is what surprises me, though. It ramps up pretty quickly in LR and sometimes without having editing for too long. Am I alone? I suspect not, but I am indeed curious. My old 2010 iMac very rarely ramped up its fan--never in LR that I can recall.
Click to expand...

i have the same issue here with my MBPr2014 ... the best model available 16gb ram, 1tb flash, nvidia 750 2gb
as soon as i'm using an additional monitor the GPU gets quiet hot and the fans are ramping up with the slightest bits of use

i'm considering a different mac and was hoping an iMac should be good

i'm really unsure now.. if i buy an iMac i spend another 3000€ and if i then notice i'm not getting rid of my noise problem i go crazy
 
twilexia said:
I'm actually getting this exact config delivered tomorrow. I don't use Lightroom personally but I do use Premiere and am curious to know how the M395 vs the M395x compares in terms of heat. A lot of tests have been made using the M395x but I'm afraid that the M395 may run a little hotter as it doesn't have as much VRAM meaning it has to work harder.
Click to expand...
and how is it ? can you share your experience?
 
verstaerker said:
i have the same issue here with my MBPr2014 ... the best model available 16gb ram, 1tb flash, nvidia 750 2gb
as soon as i'm using an additional monitor the GPU gets quiet hot and the fans are ramping up with the slightest bits of use

i'm considering a different mac and was hoping an iMac should be good

i'm really unsure now.. if i buy an iMac i spend another 3000€ and if i then notice i'm not getting rid of my noise problem i go crazy
Click to expand...

Might I suggest a liquid cooling custom built PC?

My PC is dead silent most of the time. CPU water cool fan doesn't spin on most tasks, GPU fan doesn't spin (980 GTX) unless I do graphic stuff like gaming, case fan doesn't spin on idle, even the power supply doesn't spin unless I'm really doing something crazy. I know it's Windows. I use both.

I just bought the new iMac too but it's mainly for entertainment. I think for processing power and professional use, other than the iMac and the Mac Pro, you don't have much options. The iMac uses mobile (laptop) graphics, not the full power desktop graphic cards. If your MBP gets hot when using lightroom, it'll be the same case for your iMac.

But I think you're compelled by OS X and the retina 5K.
 
Last edited:
Wallabe said:
Might I suggest a liquid cooling custom built PC?

My PC is dead silent most of the time. CPU water cool fan doesn't spin on most tasks, GPU fan doesn't spin (980 GTX) unless I do graphic stuff like gaming, case fan doesn't spin on idle, even the power supply doesn't spin unless I'm really doing something crazy. I know it's Windows. I use both.

I just bought the new iMac too but it's mainly for entertainment. I think for processing power and professional use, other than the iMac and the Mac Pro, you don't have much options. The iMac uses mobile (laptop) graphics, not the full power desktop graphic cards. If your MBP gets hot when using lightroom, it'll be the same case for your iMac.

But I think you're compelled by OS X and the retina 5K.
Click to expand...


it's not that i'm not considering this option
but i want to stay with OSX .. it's a good system for my use
so building a hackintosh is nothing i like to do as i don't want to spend more time with the hardware and config

so noise and performance wise it would the smartest to buy an mac-pro - but this one is really pricy (4838€ for a decent config i'm happy with - and i was really careful choosing options) + i need another monitor and a ram-upgrade (wich is much cheaper than the Apple-one)
 
I wish there's a simple way you could use the latest desktop graphic cards with OS X but that's not simple.
 
Could you make a video showing where and how your imac is struggling while editing photos in Lightroom?

My iMac still haven't shipped.. I would much rather stay with my Mac than cancel and build a PC..

Wondering if a partition with Window 10 and lightroom installed on Windows would perform on the new imac
 
There are a lot of reports on the newest update to LR and LRCC that are similar to what you describe. I haven't updated mine yet because of the changes to the Import module (ridiculous and Adobe acknowledges this and will change it) and because many report similar stuttering problems.

If you are on the latest LR build in CC then that may be all it is and nothing to really do with the new iMac.
 
arbitrage said:
There are a lot of reports on the newest update to LR and LRCC that are similar to what you describe. I haven't updated mine yet because of the changes to the Import module (ridiculous and Adobe acknowledges this and will change it) and because many report similar stuttering problems.

If you are on the latest LR build in CC then that may be all it is and nothing to really do with the new iMac.
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I sincerely hope that is it! It tears through PS no problem and no fans. I'm not going to jump to any conclusions, but rather wait it out and hope it's an Adobe softwRe issue
 
This is why I NEVER do updates right away if what I have is working fine. Been burned too many times over the years with ios bugs, problems in software happens all the times and that's why it's wise to wait and see before getting updates. :)
 
Golfer00ksu said:
That is disappointing to hear given I'm looking to buy mainly for LR use.
Click to expand...

I too am thinking about getting a 5K iMac, and my main computational use is Lightroom. Mixed reports all over the web, but most are simply negative. So I am a little hesitant...
 
Well mine arrives next week (5k i7 24GB 512SSD) and I will use it primarily for LRCC...I haven't updated to the main release yet so will report how it is back on CC 2015 1.1. Probably won't get to use it till Nov 15th as I'm away when it arrives.
 
Here's a video I did demonstrating how LR is faster with the GPU off. This has been my experience with ALL four of the macs my company owns:

 
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I don't have this problem, latest version of Lightroom CC on a 2011 27" iMac with Use Graphics Processor on. The thing that bugs me is the sliders aren't smooth, and I feel they should be. I have a late 2015 iMac coming to me, I will see if I still have this problem.


ohsnaphappy said:
Here's a video I did demonstrating how LR is faster with the GPU off. This has been my experience with ALL four of the macs my company owns:

Click to expand...
 
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