Scenario for choosing the 2012 Mac Pro: you have a lot of peripherals, hard drives, monitors, and generally like the idea of scalability and upgradability. Your workflow demands many cores of processing power to crank through the most complex tasks. You also demand rock solid reliability.
The 2012 Mac Pro is the De-facto Standard For a Photography Workstation. End of Story.
The Apple Mac Pro is the only machine that I whole heartedly recommend without hesitation to professionals and enthusiasts because it is so easy to access the internals for service; its aluminum case has been an industrial design icon for 10 years because of its elegance and function. If a drive goes down, you can literally swap out the bad one in 20 seconds and be up and running again. No other Apple machine will give you this peace of mind.
Let’s jump into the configuration details…
How Many Cores Do I Need?
Four, six, or 12 cores? This all depends on your workflow. Do you plan on editing video? Are you a software developer? If either of those two are true, the 12 core model is the best choice because video editing and compilation will take advantage of the extra six cores. If not, I would opt for a six core because the higher clock speed (3.3GHZ vs. 2.4GHZ) will power through your photography workflow quicker than the 12 core. Budget minded, go 4 core Mac Pro.
Remember, There is an overhead associated with more cores, so keep that in mind if you really don’t process video or run an IDE. More cores does not always mean more speed.
How Much RAM Should I Get?
If you’re like me and run a few virtual machines along with other RAM intensive applications, you should opt for as much as you can afford. If you’re unsure, you can always take a look at your Activity Monitor to see how much memory you’re using at any given point in time. It’s beneficial to dedicate more to your system in order to keep swap space usage to a minimum. I chose 48GB and that is more than enough for my photography needs; Even while working on a 7+ frame panorama, I’ve topped at 32.2GB. So, it really all depends on how large your files are and how complex your post processing adjustments become.
Swap space bad. In-memory processing good.
Hard Drive Bays and then Some…
The 2012 Mac Pro has room for up to six internal hard drives if you’re crafty and purchase slot adapters. I personally use five internal drives: a solid state boot drive in the second optical drive bay (made possible by using an OWC SSD adapter) in addition to four drive sleds occupied by 1.0TB Western Digital RE4 drives in a RAID0 array that averages between 400-500 megabytes per second for my primary data. These drives were purchased aftermarket for cost savings since Apple tends to charge exorbitant amounts for their hardware upgrades online.
PCI Express Slots, Peripherals, and Lots of Bandwidth
The Mac Pro offers one open PCI-Express 16X slot and two PCI-Express 4X slots which allow you to fully customize your build. Want a SSD that bypasses SATA and harnesses the speed of PCI-Express? Done. How about an internal ESATA card to control external hard drives at speeds that destroy USB 2.0 and Firewire. You have that option, too.
Further Reading and Configuration Suggestions
How did I choose this Mac Pro configuration? Enter Mac Performance Guide run by Lloyd Chambers. Lloyd knows his stuff so head over to his guide to learn all there is to know about configuring your Mac. He also provides the community with rock-solid performance and reliability applications for a modest fee. His MemoryTester app pegs every core, which is quite a technical feat in and of itself. Lloyd has mastered multicore programming and his application performance reflects that.
To sum it all up, the Mac Pro is, in my opinion, the best all around machine for professional and enthusiast digital photography workflows for a few reasons: its processing power is tremendous, the expandability is limitless, and choosing this machine also allows you to customize it to your heart’s desire. If you demand rock solid reliability and need constant up-time for your critical tasks, this is the only machine in Apple’s computer lineup that I recommend without any limitations.
Return from 2012 Mac Pro Recommendations to How to Choose a Computer For Photography
