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A few questions about bootcamp, RAM upgrade an 1080P gaming on a 27"

R

RealSkyDiver

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 15, 2010
570
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I finally wanna make the switch from PC to MAC so I'm getting the one with 256GB SDD + 2TV HDD. Can I install Win7 on the hdd? Don't really want to use expensive real-estate from the SDD for it.
Can I use THIS to upgrade to 16GB RAM?
Do games still look good when playing them in 1080p instead the native resolution? I read how terrible lower resolution movies looked on it so that got me a bit worried.

thanks!
 
RealSkyDiver said:
I finally wanna make the switch from PC to MAC so I'm getting the one with 256GB SDD + 2TV HDD. Can I install Win7 on the hdd? Don't really want to use expensive real-estate from the SDD for it.
Can I use THIS to upgrade to 16GB RAM?
Do games still look good when playing them in 1080p instead the native resolution? I read how terrible lower resolution movies looked on it so that got me a bit worried.

thanks!
Click to expand...

Anything less than native on an LCD display will not look great. Its doable but not advised.

Just bite the bullet and partition of an 80GB section of the SSD for Win 7 with bootcamp, youll be happy you did. You can use the 2 TB HDD for storage of files and data for both OS

Yes on the RAM
 
I have a similar question as im going to get a windows 7 copy but how much partition of the SSD do you think I should devote to windows? I wont use it particularly often and do games benefit from being on the SSD rather than the HDD.
 
Yes since it will load much faster and give a slight performance boost.
If I create a partition for Windows do I need to re-install OSX?
 
RealSkyDiver said:
Yes since it will load much faster and give a slight performance boost.
If I create a partition for Windows do I need to re-install OSX?
Click to expand...

You don't have to re-install OSX. I partitioned my 256ssd for 100gb for windows 7 64 bit. I am now thinking if just installing vmware 3.1.3 and installing windows there instead of bootcamp. Good luck
 
skasol said:
You don't have to re-install OSX. I partitioned my 256ssd for 100gb for windows 7 64 bit. I am now thinking if just installing vmware 3.1.3 and installing windows there instead of bootcamp. Good luck
Click to expand...

Doesn't that slow down Windows further?
 
RealSkyDiver said:
Doesn't that slow down Windows further?
Click to expand...

That let's you run Windows IN Mac OS X. Since your computer has to run Windows and Mac OS X at the same time, it will be slower. But it's much better on the new iMac's because they have 4 cores so you can give 2 to each. For gaming it's useless though.

As for playing in 1080p, why? Unless your playing some game from 2012 I don't see a need. 1080p won't look nearly as good and you'd be better off playing in full-resolution with some settings lowered. To get the most out of your video card, keep on the latest drivers and maybe over-clock just a bit to get 5 extra FPS. That should be enough for now, then maybe in a year or two move down to 1080p.
 
Can I load Win7 in bootcamp and parallel? I wanna use bootcamp for videogames and parallel for smaller tasks. For example I use Media Monkey to organize and manage my mp3s but it's Windows only so I don't wanna restart into Windows every-time I have to fix some tags.
 
RealSkyDiver said:
Can I load Win7 in bootcamp and parallel? I wanna use bootcamp for videogames and parallel for smaller tasks. For example I use Media Monkey to organize and manage my mp3s but it's Windows only so I don't wanna restart into Windows every-time I have to fix some tags.
Click to expand...

Yes, you can install Bootcamp, then get a VM solution (Parallels or VMWare Fusion) to load that Bootcamp instance into a VM in OSX, but still maintain the ability to natively boot into it later.
 
To answer the original question yes you can install bootcamp to the HDD instead of SSD. I *think* this didn't used to be possible so they may have changed something. I just set up a 100GB partition on the HDD for bootcamp, it is fast enough for the odd game here and there.
 
just some more thoughts.

why buy a Mac at all?

You are going to use Windblows and media monkey to manage your music (I know iTunes on the PC sucks, but not on the Mac) and switch to bootcamp t play games -- which means what exactly will you be doing on the Mac side?

Surfing? PC = Mac

email? (you probably use web based email like gmail?) so no apple mail

Picasa works on the Mac for photos

google docs for everything else...

so again, Im not seeing the need to switch?

And that ram will work, but why 16 gigs?

add 8 gigs @ $70 to current 4 gigs = 12 gigs for $70

add 16 gigs @ $140 pull current 4 gigs = 16 gigs for $140.

that last 4 gigs just cost $70. ouch.
 
Badger^2 said:
just some more thoughts.

why buy a Mac at all?

You are going to use Windblows and media monkey to manage your music (I know iTunes on the PC sucks, but not on the Mac) and switch to bootcamp t play games -- which means what exactly will you be doing on the Mac side?

Surfing? PC = Mac

email? (you probably use web based email like gmail?) so no apple mail

Picasa works on the Mac for photos

google docs for everything else...

so again, Im not seeing the need to switch?

And that ram will work, but why 16 gigs?

add 8 gigs @ $70 to current 4 gigs = 12 gigs for $70

add 16 gigs @ $140 pull current 4 gigs = 16 gigs for $140.

that last 4 gigs just cost $70. ouch.
Click to expand...

What about running it specifically to run Windows off of the 27" IPS screen. Of course you could just buy the monitor but it would be nice to have OSX for some OSX specific apps.
 
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I Parton Ed my SSD to 100gb, taking note win 7 64bit uses min 20gb. I uploaded OEM win7 using apple bootload, the installed parallel 6 on Mac ox to identify win7 on the primary drive.
Then I realized whenever, I use prallel on Mac my win can't play my utube full size. Eventh
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

I Parton Ed my SSD to 100gb, taking note win 7 64bit uses min 20gb. I uploaded OEM win7 using apple bootload, the installed parallel 6 on Mac ox to identify win7 on the primary drive.
Then I realized whenever, I use prallel
on Mac my win can't play my utube full
size. So I went to primary drive and uploaded all the win drivers Inc ATI drv,sound. Then when I use parallel, my tube can be play full frame video. So some manual work here to be done.
 
I'm doing music production where OSX is pretty much the norm. Besides it would speed up my workflow significantly with a faster OS and no annoying bugs and errors to loose time over:)
I just wished it came with more usb ports and was usable with desktop RAM so upgrading to 32GB wouldn't be so prohibitively expensive.

@Vanan Navarasan
Why would you play youtube win Win parallel? Just watch it in OSX.
 
Last edited:
If I decide not to want Windows on the ssd anymore to free the space for osx can I just unify the 2 partitions again without having to re-install osx again?
 
As for gaming: Rest assured. I just switched to a 27" 2011 iMac as my only machine at home too. Wasn't sure if the GPU would be enough for newer games but so far:
No problems with any game on 2560x1440. In BF Bad Company 2 (a quite demanding game) on Win7 in BootCamp for example I get 45-50FPS on DX11 mode with the AMD HD6970M 2GB+ i5-2400 3,1GHz.
I would recommend going for native resolution and turning down AA/AF since you won't notice it on that screen anyway.
 
Can I put files larger than 4GB on the internal hdd right out of the box? I hope they don't format it with the outdated/useless fat32.
 
After the first Bootcamp Setup you will come to the normal Windows Setup Screen. There you also can choose NTFS as Fileformat.
 
No, don't worry...

You have a 100% normal Windows Setup Screen, there you can choose the Harddisk, then you can size your partition and also choose the Filesystem to format your disk.
 
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