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In a VM, the same score is 182.9 MB/s, a fourfold increase. Under Boot Camp, the 128 GB SSD delivers Random Read throughput of 49.5 MB/s. ![]() And once again you can see the effects of storage drivers. The penalty is even worse because the VM only has 1 GB of RAM available, whereas the Boot Camp installation has 4 GB to work with. On the two MacBook Airs, you can really see the hit that the Intel graphics take when they're forced to run using virtual graphics drivers. The Random Read score is 1.2 MB/s under Boot Camp but increases to 2.7 MB/s when using Parallels. Look at the difference in performance on the Mac Mini, where the WEI score goes from 5.9 to 6.9. Surprisingly, one area of Windows performance actually improves dramatically in a virtual machine. The lower scores reflect the differences accurately All of those effects are smooth when running under Boot Camp, but I can see tearing and jerky movements in a virtual machine. #Will parallels desktop for mac run windows 7 pro. driversBoth VMware and Parallels have decent drivers capable of delivering Aero support with transparency and other effects. Likewise, graphics performance in a VM suffers because Windows is unable to use the native Nvidia or Intel drivers and instead has to pass everything through virtualized graphics adapters. The difference is even more striking in the two MacBook Airs, where the different CPU models account for part of the gap but the VM adds a further penalty. For those two tasks, you're essentially losing half of the CPU by running in a VM. On my system, the Boot Camp installation scored 308 MB/s for the CPUCompression2Metric and 470.9 MB/s for the Encryption2Metric, versus 152.5 and 223.0 for the same metric under Parallels. You can see at a glance that virtualization takes a significant chunk of CPU capability away. For the optimized setup, I increased RAM to 3 or 4 GB. ![]() The default VM configuration sets aside a mere 1 GB of RAM for the VM. The two MacBook Airs have different CPUs, but both have the same 128 GB SSD and Intel onboard graphics. The color coding is simple, bright green is the best, dark red is the worst, with yellow in the middle. The top group shows scores for my Mac Mini the bottom chart shows the two MacBook Airs.Īll of these scores are on a scale of 1-7.9. Here are the side-by-side WEI scores for all systems. ![]() You can look at the five numbers that make up the Windows Experience Index (WEI), but the detailed numbers are much more illuminating. To measure performance, I looked at the raw data that Windows captures when you run the Windows System Assessment tool (WinSAT.exe). What I found even more interesting was the decrease in performance that you get when you run Windows on Apple hardware. It's at least $300 if you use commercial virtualization software, and possibly much more if you need to pay for additional licenses for Windows apps. That's a bare minimum of $250 on top of the premium cost you pay for Apple's hardware. If you plan to use Boot Camp exclusively, you can skip this line item. VirtualBox is a free option, but when I looked at it a few months ago it was behind the others in terms of Windows support. I've been able to find discounts that take the cost into the sub-$60 range.
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