As a 13' Macbook Air and low end desktop PC owner, it was time for me to upgrade to a more serious platform for photo and video editing. With limited onboard storage, the Mac Pro was not an option. My choices were the 27' iMac (either regular or 5K), a custom build PC or a Hackintosh (more on that here: ). The Hackintosh did appeal to me but it would have restricted my build to very specific parts. I would have installed Windows anyway as a few softwares I use are not supported by OSX, so I ruled it out. I felt the non-5K iMac would not be powerful enough for my use, and a maxed-out 5K iMac would run too expensive.

We shed some light on what we think is the best computer for photo editing and hope to. Visual studio for mac vs visual studio code. I grew up with a PC and am often a bit confused when using MAC. Photo editing is intensive, but not extremely so; so I wouldn't drop 'regardless of cost', spend a bit less and keep the remainder in my bankaccount to I just did a Google search for best photo editing PC. One interesting company is Puget sound that recommend what they call a Genesis I. Very high spec.

So I built my own PC. To compare the specs, here is a show-down of each option. • The 27' non-5K iMac I considered was the 3.5Ghz i7 (3.9 turbo) with 16GB of Ram, a 3TB Fusion drive (which combines a 128GB SSD and a 3TB hard drive) and the GTX775M graphics card. As of February 2015, this costs just under €2800 or £2050. • The 5K iMac with all the available options is close to my current setup. It uses the same i7-4790K CPU running at 4.0Ghz (4.4 Turbo) with 16GB of Ram, a 3TB Fusion Drive and the AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4GB graphics card.

This runs at €3450 or £2550 • The PC I built is based on the i7-4790K processor, 16GB of 1866Mhz Ram, a 256GB SSD + 2 x 2TB 7200Rpm hard drives and the GTX970 4GB GPU. I will upgrade it to 32GB of Ram and will add a 512GB SSD. With a Windows 7 licence and a few accessories (optical drive, SD / micro SD card reader, high end CPU cooler, quiet case fans, mid-tower quiet case (Fractal Design R5)) and a 27' 1440p IPS display, it costs around €2200 or £1600. The GTX775M is benchmarked at 4530 points ( ), the R9 295X 4GB scores just below 5000 and the GTX970 4GB tops at 8603 points. Do not confuse the mobile versions of the graphics cards used in the iMac when reading the chart. The R9 M290X gets a score of only 2547 while the desktop 290X card reaches 6875. The main goal of going high-end was to speed up the operation when photo and video editing.

Is chrome or firefox better for mac. I use the Adobe suite (Lightroom, Premiere Pro and After Effects) and their softwares are fairly optimised. Both Premiere Pro and After Effects use GPU accelerations to speed up rendering times, this is why I went for the GTX970 graphics card with lots of CUDA cores and Vram. Two months later, here are my thoughts: • Choosing the parts and building the PC was an interesting experience. It certainly was way easier than I thought and I learnt a lot during the whole process.

• I enjoy the upgradability of my system. I can re-use hard drives from my previous PC or setup a RAID array very easily. If the graphics power ever becomes insufficient, I can always add a second graphics card in SLI and double the graphic power. • I tried a few games in Ultra, all run very smoothly. Except Flight Simulator X. Here is what I did not expect: • Despite choosing quiet fans and a quiet case, the PC is nowhere near quiet even when idling.

• Flight Simulator X still struggles at times. I use it when coaching some of my flying friends and it is disappointing to see that even this high-end system is not powerful enough without over-clocking the processor. Most scenes are more than fine but a highly detailed New York city in ultra settings will kill it (down to 15 fps in 1080p). • Coil whine. If you've never heard of it before, have a look on youtube.

It is a high pitch electronic noise and is very audible. Both my graphics card and the power unit suffer from coil noise and it is extremely annoying. This alone makes it worth getting a much more pricey and slower iMac. Fortunately, it only happens when stressing the GPU (when gaming). • Boot times are nowhere near as fast as my Macbook Air. Windows vs OSX. • I miss a lot of features from OSX that simply don't exist under Windows.

• Windows can't display raw (.CR2) photo files natively, OSX can. Big deal for photographers who shoot raw. • Photo editing with Adobe Lightroom 5 is actually not a lot faster than on the much lower-end Macbook Air. On the go operations like clarity or tone curves are fast on both systems, the Macbook Air slows down a lot when making finer adjustments like spot removal or using the adjustment brush. And so does my custom built PC. It is not as slow but it certainly is slower than I expected. Zooming used to be very slow on the Macbook and it is not a lot smoother on the PC.