MacOs Material update speed

I’ve been using UE4 for over a year and am comfortable with most features, except the material editor, largely because of how slow it is for me. While I have a PC, I prefer couch-based development and have used my Macbook so far which hasn’t faltered yet, except of the material editor. is there any settings that I can adjust to improve the render speed, even if it’s a lower LOD until i render it in the game?

Specs:
OS Sierra 10.12.6
2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 DDR3
Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

Can anyone advise me, or would it ultimately be better to learn the material editor on the PC, since the GPU is likely going to accelerate the process?

Thanks