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Hardware Question - iMac 27" and Photoshop CC


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studio302

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Hello PSGs!

I was wondering if there were any techies out there that could answer a question for me.

I'm retouching with CC on a superpowered Mac at school. I don't do video or 3D editing, just compositing, beauty retouching, etc. (tons of layers but nothing too insane). Most of the files I'm working on are full sized 23mp images at 16bit, and I also work on large (up to 1GB) scans (tiffs from fff files).

I'm buying a 27" (non-Retina/5K) iMac for home use, and was wondering if anybody knew if there was a real performance issue with the storage (it comes standard with Serial ATA 1TB but I was considering upgrading to 512GB flash instead) once you're inside the program, or does the difference mainly translate to faster start-up and opening applications? Has anyone on here upgraded and noticed a difference?

I've read about a zillion forums and talked to multiples salespeople but I am hoping for PHOTOSHOP users specific direct experience. If it takes a second or two longer to open CC I don't care about that, and I'd rather invest the $500 upgrade fee somewhere else.

As it is I'm upgrading from 3.4/i5 to 3.5GHz i7, upgrading the Graphics card from 2GB to 4GB and upgrading the RAM to 16GB. Does anybody with direct experience know if that extra $500 for the upgrade to the flash storage is going to translate into much more than a quicker launch?

I hope I'm not posting this in the wrong area, I'm new to the forums but excited to join!

Thanks!

(Including a link to the Apple store page with the pertinent info)

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac?product=ME089LL/A&step=config#
 
I'm running 2.5 GHz IC 15 with 500 GB SATA storage/16 GB of DDR.

I have no problems with PS opening and I have never even come close to filling the storage. Just in case I have a 2 TB external.
 
This is the big Apple Dilemma and 1 of the reasons people are avoiding the latest models.

so here it is straight
Yes the flash drive will increase performance dramatically on boot up and program launching but as your using the program will it increase performance I wouldnt say it would as that is where the ram and cpu come into play as it is not really reading and writing to the hard drive. But yes in general you will see performance increase 1 of the reasons being the hdd will not generate heat. The 2nd being no moving parts on the HDD so it won't sleep and make the comp freeze momentarily when the drive starts powering down with energy saver etc. Your Scratch disk will also be faster so this will add some performance gains.

However $500 upgrade seems steep considering you can get a 1tb ssd for that price.

Now this is where the new macs come into negativity ram and storage is part of the mainboard so you can not just swap the hard drive and upgrade it to an ssd on the cheap, you have to do it through apple. So if your hard drive or ram fails out of warranty you can pretty much say goodbye to data saved on it and expect a $500 cost for repair maybe even more.


I have not stripped down any new macs to see how much of that is true or if there is a work around but if I was you and you want the new generation then maybe look into the 1tb drive as that will be sata buy it set it up and then do a time machine backup and if your confident then remove the rear panel as delicately as possible as to not leave trace that you went in it (all though apple can not void your warranty for changing or removing your hard drive) and replace the hdd with a standard ssd for about $100- $400 depending on size and quality such as this 1 http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-I...pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1423602418&sr=1-1&keywords=ssd
Giving you a 1tb ssd drive. then boot holding down the R key or maybe command R and select recover from time machine back up which will essentially clone your pre configured drive to the ssd, or you can do a direct clone if you have a spare pc laying around and something like acronis disk clone.

$100 saved Double the STorage and ability to swap the hard drive yourself in the future if anything goes wrong.

Or save some more money and shop around for last generation imac get a standard i7 model and do ram upgrade and ssd yourself probably saving around $700
 
Hoogle, thanks very much. The in-depth experience is really helpful. I'm going to upgrade the RAM myself but I actually didn't know I could update the SSD myself on the previous version so I'm going to do some research. I appreciate the help!
 
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