With Macs built on pentium boxes, are there any performance drops from running Windows as a 2nd OS?

Question

It is about time for me to buy another computer. I used MACs until I was in the military, then switched to a Wintel box. I still feel that MACs are way ahead of Wintel boxes, but all military software runs only on PCs. I want to still be able to do all my work, and I was wondering if there are any performance problems with running Windows on a MAC now that MACs run on Intel chips?

Answer 1

I am using iMac Intel Core 2 Duo 20". I know what you mean. Some applications and web sites will run only on Windows. I have been using bootcamp to boot up WinXP natively on my iMac and it works a 100% that of a pentium machine. There's no drop in performance on Windows compared to a non-Mac machine with equivalent hardware. There's nothing that is not compaitble. The graphics card, processor, usb, firewire etc are all optimized perfectly. For that matter, certain dual platform applications and games even runs faster on the WinXP bootup. I vouch a 100% for it.

Alternatively, you can check out Parallel that allows running of Windows apps on OSX. But I prefer the raw native performance offered under bootcamp.