Macbook Pro Retina as a PC Question

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Macbook Pro Retina as a PC Question

First of all, I'm 100% buying a Macbook Pro Retina very soon. My job is in video production so I'm primarily going to be using it for that. However, I also enjoy PC gaming every now and then so I'm hoping to set up Bootcamp and Windows 7 on the machine as well. However, I don't want to run bootcamp on the main internal hard drive... so, my question is, could I buy a thunderbolt enabled external hard drive and use it as a boot drive for windows? If so, would thunderbolt be fast enough for me to play PC games on an external hard drive like that? I suppose I COULD potentially just partition off a part of the main internal SSD, but I'd rather not.

What do y'all think? Is it possible? Would it be effective, or would I lose a ton of speed by using bootcamp on an external hard drive like that?

Windows 7, Also have a Macbook running OSX

Posted on Oct 10, 2012 5:29 PM

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Answer 1

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Csound1

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Oct 11, 2012 11:34 AM in response to Breadman86

Windows will not boot from an external drive and Boot Camp won't put it there because of that.

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Answer 2

Breadman86 Author

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Oct 11, 2012 11:46 AM in response to Csound1

Okay, any idea what my other options might be then? Even if I go with the 512gb drive, I'd really rather not partition off more than about 50gb to run Windows, and that wouldn't leave much room for more than 2 or 3 games. If I did that, and ran Windows 7 on a 50gb partition, do you think I could have an external thunderbolt hard drive formatted NTFS that I could install and run games on? Would that be fast enough, or would the fact that it's external and the games are loading off of a separate drive cause some FPS drops? Would Windows even recognize an NTFS drive connected up via Thunderbolt?

Any advice/options you see for potentially using the comp as a gaming device (for a year or two until I can build a separate desktop PC), other than the ideas I just mentioned? Could that work?

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Answer 3

Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Oct 11, 2012 11:53 AM in response to Breadman86

You'd have to consult some Windows guys about running apps from a remote drive, it may work but I don't know. 50G is marginal for Win7, I usually recomend a minimum of 60. Sorry but can't offer more advice on the games subjst.

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Answer 4

choe

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Nov 28, 2012 12:46 PM in response to Breadman86

I have the 15" Retina Macbook Pro with the 2.6Ghz i7 and the 512GB SSD. I have Windows 7 installed on my SSD using Paralles 8. I don't really game but I can tell you that using an Apple TV to mirror the content to an external TV will have some lag, and any lag I am assuming is too much lag for gaming. You can however connect your rMBP to an external monitor (HD television in my case) using the HDMI connection port and there is no notacible lag. So that option may work for you. It would certainly be worth a try. As far as running Windows 7 on a rMBP using a Virtual Machine such as Parallels 8, I think it runs faster and better than on most PC's. You can confugure the setting in the Parelles application such as hard disk space, RAM, and Cores you are using. I only dedicate 30GB of Hard disk, two cores, and 4 GB of RAM and it is blazing fast for everything I use it for. Then again, the 15" rMBP is in my opinion one of the fastest laptops on the market. I am very well pleased with it and since I use a VM I have the best of both worlds, a Mac and a PC, all while keeping the speed and quality of a MAC.

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