thats still interesting for me, as i am working in prof. photography and constantly look for ways to improve my working place.
as far as now, i ve been working with 2 systems since 2005:
- old mac pro 2006 (1st mac pro metal house) and current mac pro late 2013 with 64GB RAM: the old one (first mac pro 2006 with 16GB RAM) was a real work horse and is still working since 2006 (yes we are at feb. 2017), running nearly 24h, 5 days per week in postproduction.
the new one is fast enough for most photography, postproduction and video works with at least 64GB RAM. (my files are mostly 16bit and 10-50 GB each)
- imac late 2013 and imac late 2015 5k with 32GB RAM: not as satisfying regarding speed and performance as mac pro 2013 but ok for batch processing large phase-one 60 or 80 Megapixel raws in 16bit. working on large 16bit .psb at 10.000 pixel square format, with imac is very slow when you have a decent amount of layers (20-60), actually you cant work with the imac on such large 16bit files.
so the mac pro with plenty ram (64GB) is still my favorite for photoshop cc 2017,
if you have got the money to spend on 6core, go with it, if not, the 4core is ok due to higher gigaherz. (3,7). the 8 core is not supported by photoshop, as i think that it utilizes only 3 or 4 cores max. so, if you got a 6 core mac pro, the rest of the 6 cores, (for example 2) are used by the finder for copy processes, zipping, safari or mail.
think about 8 core: it has lower gigaherz, and this means it will run slower for photoshop cc as it is dependent on Ghz. (higher Ghz = faster working photoshop)
another very important experience: always order the 1TB SSD or at least 512GB SSD. the rest of the unused space is used as scratch disc by CC. and 2 or 3 parallel projects can gain up to 200 or 300GB of SSD space. so the 512GB SSD in my mac pro is always full, unless i dont have any multiple job-projects.
working on after effects cc 2017 and premiere projects besides photography: they are very hungry for SSD space, thats why i would prefer the 1 or 2TB SSD from 2017 or 2018.
as backup and 2nd scratch disc for photoshop i use one OWC thunderbay 4 via thunderbolt and one caldigit T3 with an empty 256GB SSD dedicated only for photoshop CC 2017 also via thunderbolt on second thunderbolt bus.
the mac pro has 2 thunderbolt bus ports, thats a huge advantage, as 2 datastreams can run independently direct to the processor cores via PCI.
of course i am looking forward to order the runner up: a potential 6core mac pro 2017 with Thunderbolt 3 and faster internal SSD with 2-3 GB/second throughput.
whats your opinion?
