What's your system Mac + a77/a900/a850 owners?

For the Mac owners and a77/a900/a850 shooters among us: could you please outline the main specs of your Mac + PP software + OSX version and briefly comment on how fast it handles 24 Mpx raw files?

My old mac mini has moved on to the electronic hereafter so I'm forced to shop for a replacement a bit earlier than I planned. At the moment my largest raw files are 14 mpx (from an a450 and a290) so the lowly first generation 1.83 GHz intel duo mini with 2 Gb RAM and 320 Gb 5400 rpm drive that I was using till now was good enough (if not blazing fast by a long shot). But as I'm probably going to move up to one of the 24 Mpx alpha bodies a year from now, I'd like to get post processing hardware capable of handling a77/a900 size raw files with reasonably speed.

The catch of course is that the more I spend now at the computing end, the less I will have left for the camera side of my budget, and there may well be financially lean times ahead work wise. So I'm hoping not to go over $900 for a faster mac - especially keeping in mind the potential price/specs of the rumored SLT full frame model(s) that might appear by the end of 2012.

I'm fairly pleased with my current monitor and not in need of a portable system, so I've been looking mostly at ratings for older mac pros (would have to be 2006/7 models to stay under $1000) and 2009-2011 mac minis at benchmark websites etc. But those are not necessarily super informative as my workflow centers mostly around DxO 7 and gimp in OSX 10.6, while the speed tests in websites typically are more game-centered and if they include any photo software at all then it's usually one of photoshop's versions or lowly iphoto.

Any tips and personal experience on relevant hardware performance are appreciated!


Edited by pdeley - 02 February 2012 at 16:28

Yes, the speed gains with SSD drives in web benchmarks are pretty dramatic! Do you use one of those in your macbook pro? They're still really expensive in $ per Gb though so not really an option within sub $1000 budget as far as I can tell...

Apple charges ridiculous prices for their hardware... A 512gb SSD drive is 1400$ at the apple store. Comparable drives from different manufacturers in a local shop start at about 750$.

The Apple store site dosen't specify the techinical details of transfer rates and such, so it's difficult to compare part for part.

Do the Apple-branded drives use special connectors ? Or standard SATA ?

I use 2010 Macbook Pro (2.4ghz, 8gb RAM) which is reasonable with the 24mb A900 RAW files, although I would like it a little faster.

2008 iMac (2.83ghz, 4gb RAM) is quite a bit slower.

Use Aperture 3 on both.

Upgrading from 4gb RAM in the MacBook pro made a noticeable improvement but iMac will only take 6gb so will upgrade the whole machine rather than just 2gb RAM.

Sounds like I need SSD to boost things a little, although liking to have all my pics in one library limits that!

I have a a65 and shoot RAW almost exclusively.
I use a 16 month old iMac with i5 processor and 12 gigs of memory (the extra memory is essential) and do most of my post-processing with Aperture. I also recently purchased an inexpensive blu-ray burner for backup (24 megapixel RAW files quickly fill up DVD-R's).

I find my system works with 24 megapixel RAW files easily. It is not quite as snappy as the 10 megapixel images from my a230.

To me the key things you want are:
1) lots of memory (3d party memory is very cheap) - the more the better.
2) Lots of hard disk space (multiple USB drives should be adequate).
It doesn't take a lot of processor power to manipulate the images if you have both of the above.

I use a 2 year old iMac with Aperture 3 and Photoshop CS5 installed. I've got OSX 10.6.8, 3.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and 8GB of RAM.

I'm happy to say that it works fine for my new a77. The files are noticeably slower to process than a700 ones, but it's not so much that it's very annoying. My only problem is hard drive space!

EDIT: Forgot to say, I only ever shoot RAW.

pdeley wrote: Thanks for all the responses so far! Please keep them coming 5thElefant wrote: Macbook Air 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB. OS X 10.6.8 I have DXO on it that I've only used a couple of times. Slow and the screen is too small. if you use DxO only occasionally, what would be your more frequent raw conversion approach 5th? And is the slow DxO v6 or v7? Wallendo wrote: I also recently purchased an inexpensive blu-ray burner for backup (24 megapixel RAW files quickly fill up DVD-R's). Does the BD-R work directly with your iMac Wallendo, or is there some trickery involved? (like burning BD from windows in parallels or such) AFAIK Apple chose not to implement any support for bluray drives...

I bought an LG "Super Multi Blue Rewriter"

It works on Lion out of the box.

Toast is needed to make video BD's, but data BD's can be created just by inserting a blank BD and dragging the files to this disk (no added software or drivers needed).