Time required to generate 1,121 Smart Previews for the imported images, both machines used 2048px and the same “Medium” quality settings for their Smart Preview settings in the Catalog Preferences. 114% quicker than Apple iMAC Lightroom Smart Previews Time required to import 1,121 images directly from the internal SSD drive on each machine. All image settings were held equal between machines for control, and all tests were run 2-3 times to ensure accuracy. Lightroom’s primary need/bottleneck is clock speed, hence faster clock speed = faster Lightroom.įor the following series of tests, 1,121 identical RAW images from the Canon 5D Mark III and Canon 5DS were used on both machines. Higher clock speeds are possible, but at the sacrifice of the system stability. This speed and chip set configuration has been tested for long-term stability. Note that Joseph did safely overclock the CPU to 4.5Ghz, the speed we run most computers in the studio.

*This custom PC was built by Joseph Wu almost a year ago, and it still flies. Prices listed are continually fluctuating and subject to change, but dollar amounts represented here were accurate at the time of purchase/build.

While we are testing for a larger/higher output studio than most, our testing methodology is based on budget, and we wanted to see how two similarly priced machines fair against one another. For a studio processing millions of images each year, image-to-image speed is absolutely paramount, so we optimize to suit. It is within Adobe Lightroom that our studio spends the majority of time, thus, Lightroom is, and will be, the focus of our testing.

Lightroom macbook