ethanwa Posted October 9, 2009 Share Posted October 9, 2009 I'm about to buy a bunch of parts to make a Snow Leopard hackintosh: Intel i7 920 CPU 6GB DDR3 1866 RAM Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM SATA2 HD etc... etc... I'm going to go for an overclock of close to 4GHz, maybe a bit less just for stability reasons. I'm really anxious to see how quickly Parallels or VMWare loads and runs various versions of Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7). Anyone have any benchmarks to go off of? Are they quick? I know running XP on my 2GB RAM 24'' iMac 2.8Ghz is still extremely sluggish when switching between using the Mac and Windows, and it's almost just unusable because I just can't stand some of the wait times. Can anyone give me any insight into what kind of speeds I can expect from virtualization with the setup listed above? Ethan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
el_charlie Posted October 9, 2009 Share Posted October 9, 2009 It's freakin' fast (Windows 7 RTM) on my Hackintosh (see my specs below) and it will be faster on the one you're planning to buy ('cause the Core i7 and RAM). BUT, Don't try to play games on a VM. The new versions of Parallels / VMware barey support AERO for Windows Vista/7. That means that you won't get an amazing performance on 3D games/apps. The rest runs just fine. Keep in mind that a Virtual Machine doesn't virtualize your peripherals, just the CPU, therefore, on the VM's device manager, the display adapter will be a XXXXX Virtual Adapter, not your real nVidia or ATI card and obviously your real card's drivers won't work. Also keep in mind that your VM will use the ammount of RAM you configure, so OSX can't use all of your RAM until you turn off your VM. But with 6GB you can run Mac and Windows smoothly. Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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