Parallels or VMWare Fusion on 27 inch iMac

Probably because a virtual machine (under either VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop) is not as efficient at using multiple processors, compared to running the OS directly. Or the test system had the virtual machine set to only use one (or two) cores. If that is the case, the clock speed would be more important than the number of processing cores. The Core 2 Duo iMac has faster clock speed.

But hopefully you are not buy an iMac just run Windows in a virtual machine. 🙂

More info at http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/review/1563720/parallels-versus-fusion

I can't get either Parallels or VMWare to install on my i5 27". Both come back with similar failures.

I have Parallels 5 running on my iMac i7 with Windows 7 64bit. I set it up to use 4 out of the 8 processors, and assigned 4GB of Ram (I have 8GB total on my iMac) to the virtual machine.

I also have an older home-brew PC here with Asus AI7 Motherboard, 500GB Seagate SATA HD (x2), 3.4GHz P4 processor, ATI Radeon 4670 Video (AGP!), and 4GB RAM running Windows 7 32bit.

Comparison? There is none! iMac Running Parallels above SMOKES the AI7 Machine. I couldn't believe the difference. It is just unbelievable.

And the key thing here is on my iMac I can run OS X at the same time with NO noticeable performance degradation. I'm sending this from Safari right now, with Entourage and few other things running in the background, along with Win7 running in a different Space full screen. This is GREAT!

I just bought a 2.66GHz i5 iMac.
VMWare Fusion launches at lighting speed compared with my old 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo machine. About a 20 to 1 difference in launch time.
Amazing.