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Advice needed: hackintosh build for extreme lightroom performance?

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Oct 17, 2016
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First of all, hi all! I'm new here! Let me start of by saying that I have much experience doing my own builds, but not for hackintosh. I went all-Mac in 2005 and I currently own a MacBook Pro 2010, geekbench 3 multi-core score 64 bit 4800. But the new Mac Pro is underwhelming and expensive, the iMac is extremely overpriced for essentially a high-end laptop with a screen built-in, and new MacBook's are still not on the horizion. So I want to do my own hackintosh build.

(1) What system do I need to push lightroom to the limits?

(2) Is it realistic to expect a geekbench score of around 21000 with an i7 6700k 4.0ghz? It seems like it should be possible: https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?dir=desc&q=6700K+mac&sort=multicore_score

In principle I have some money at my disposal, so my first aim is to choose the sickest most performant components, see how expensive it is. And if it is really too expensive, look for cheaper components.

Thanks already!
 
I get 21000+ but I'm overclocked to 4.7GHz.
Screen Shot 2016-07-12 at 3-1.15.11 PM.png

Base clock would probably be closer to about 18K.

The current iMac uses desktop class i7-6700K.

I would imagine that you are being severely bottlenecked by the SATA 2 in your MacBook Pro for Lightroom use.
 
I get 21000+ but I'm overclocked to 4.7GHz.
View attachment 216102

Base clock would probably be closer to about 18K.

The current iMac uses desktop class i7-6700K.

I would imagine that you are being severely bottlenecked by the SATA 2 in your MacBook Pro for Lightroom use.

Thanks for the information. How did you overclock it? Bios? Did you need extra cooling? I'm also aiming for a very quiet system like stock macs.

Yeah, Lightroom on my MacBook Pro doesn't run smoothly AT ALL. It is constantly lagging and beachballing. I MUST upgrade.
 
I have an Asus motherboard and the included software automated my overclock for me. I just clicked on the app and it went through a series of tests and concluded that 4.7GHz was stable.

My system is air cooled using Noctua fans and heatsink. Under normal usage, I can't hear the system at all. When I push the CPU, I can hear the air moving but not the fans. I'm extremely impressed with these Noctuas.
 
I have an Asus motherboard and the included software automated my overclock for me. I just clicked on the app and it went through a series of tests and concluded that 4.7GHz was stable.

My system is air cooled using Noctua fans and heatsink. Under normal usage, I can't hear the system at all. When I push the CPU, I can hear the air moving but not the fans. I'm extremely impressed with these Noctuas.

Sounds very compelling. Did you run the overlocking software on Windows? Care to share your whole build configuration so that I can learn from it?
 
Thanks. There are lots of other great builds in the User Builds and Golden Builds sub-forums. I did a lot of reading before taking the plunge to try and learn as much as possible from others.
 
From my experience, Lightroom is more disk intensive rather than cpu intensive.

Rapidly going through your photoshoot pictures, ranking photos, color-coding, and doing quick adjustments on RAW files, with file sizes that are tens of megabytes in size each, you want at least a 7200rpm drive, or better yet a fast SSD drive when working on your pictures.

Also best to have a separate hard drive to store your photos from your OSX system drive. It helps.

Lots of memory, 24GB at least. 32GB will be better. (when you edit your RAW from LR to Photoshop, it's a really huge TIFF file).
 
Thanks. There are lots of other great builds in the User Builds and Golden Builds sub-forums. I did a lot of reading before taking the plunge to try and learn as much as possible from others.

Thanks! Quick question.. you said you overclocked your CPU to 4.7Ghz. Do you need to overclock memory as well?

Why did you settle on G.Skill Trident Z Series? Did you consider Kingston Hyper Fury X / Savage or Crucial Ballistix LT?

I really want to know what memory is best to go with, especially if I'm overclocking the CPU a bit.

Thanks!
 
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