There are many types of upgrades available for Mac laptops and desktop, and each effects computer performance in different ways. Capture Integration is a leading expert at customizing computers for photographic applications, especially for tethered and untethered use of Capture One. This article is meant to to help identify what upgrades will have what effect on the speed of Capture One.
Capture Integration a Professional Value Added Reseller and offers both standard and highly customized Apple laptops and desktops. Call 877-217-9870 to discuss your needs.
Processors – Speed and Quantity
Processor speed is well named because it will determine how fast your computer can process RAW files into TIFFs/JPGs. It will also have an impact on any math-intensive operation (i.e. perspective correction or multiple-image stitching). Depending on your workflow, processing speed may or may not be very important. Many photographers process hundreds of RAW files at one time, leaving the operation to run overnight. If you often wait at the computer for tasks such as processing or image-stitching to complete, then a faster processor will reduce your wait time. Capture One uses multiple cores to great effect when outputting processed images. If you typically process dozens or hundreds of shots at a time then the multi-core machines will cut down processing time dramatically.
Laptop Hard Drive Speed
The standard hard drive for laptops rotates at 5400rpm. Upgrading to a 7200rpm hard drive will generally provide a boost in performance when reading or writing to the hard drive. If possible, upgrade to a faster hard drive and if you need more storage, then use an external hard drive for any data you don’t need immediate access to. Capture Integration’s custom MacBookPro includes TWO of the fastest internal laptop hard drives in a RAID configuration for the absolute fastest laptop performance.
RAM
The RAM of the computer is the short-term memory, and is absolutely essential when working with high-resolution images. It is the easiest way to increase the perceived speed of the computer. When opening an image in Capture One, Photoshop, or other editing program, the image will be loaded into RAM. When the RAM is full, part of the image and the data associated with it must go back to the hard drive. Even a very fast hard drive cannot read and write data nearly as fast as RAM. The bottom line: if you don’t have enough RAM, working with large-images will slow your computer to a crawl.
RAID Card
The Apple RAID card allows you to combine two or more physical hard drives into one virtual hard drive, either providing increased speed or an automatic protection against hard-drive failure. Capture Integration can help you decide whether RAID is a good option for you and can even pre-configure your Mac Pro with RAID for you.
Video Card
As a trend in the industry more and more computation is being off-loaded from the CPU to the Video Card (a.k.a. GPU). OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, the successor to OSX 10.5, will continue this trend. However, as it stands today the Video card is not used in Capture One, so faster/better video cards will not speed up Capture One.
Warranty
The standard Apple warranty is 1 year. The AppleCare Protection Plan is a 2 year warranty extension (yielding a total warranty of 3 years). The price for AppleCare is $349 for a MacBookPro, and $249 for a MacPro. Given the low cost of AppleCare compared to the computer, it seems very prudent to purchase this additional protection.
