Altium Designer on rMBP ?

[slo-climber]

Hi.

I want to run Altium Designer on my rMBP. If I am correct, it is not available for OS X (only for Windows). What do you suggest me to do? To install Parallels and run Altium like that or via Boot Camp?

Beside the Altium I will need also MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) because Apple's software (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) is not fully compatible with Office documents.

And maybe I will also need to have Delphi.

So, what do you suggest for running those programs? Boot Camp or Parallels?

I have Late 2013 rMBP (2.6 GHz, 16 GB Ram, 512 SSD) with OS X Yosemite.

Thank you a lot

 

[paolo-]

I'm not very familiar with PCB design software. However, I'll assume it's like most CAD software and requires graphics acceleration to run properly and sometimes needs a bit of CPU power. For that reason, I'd suggest running it in Boot Camp. MS Office exists for Mac but lacks certain features and doesn't have the best performance (especially Excel).

What you can do is Parallels your BootCamp partition. That way you can quickly boot up your PC partition in Parallels to make small changes to a Word file for example. And when you need the full power, you can restart the computer.

 

[slo-climber]

Thank you.

So, with Parallels the computer can't use all of the graphics? I mean both inegrated and discrete. But with Boot Camp it could?

Correct me if I'm wrong please.

 

[paolo-]

Thank you.

So, with Parallels the computer can't use all of the graphics? I mean both inegrated and discrete. But with Boot Camp it could?

Correct me if I'm wrong please.

I believe you can use both graphics card (you can actually only use the discrete in Boot Camp) but I think the problem is with drivers for graphics acceleration. I'm not sure what's the state on this right now. But I remember a few years back trying to run CAD software through parallels and the viewport would stutter a lot and also glitch quite a bit. Looking the update log, it seems like progress was made with every iteration of the software. It might be useable by now.

However, keep in mind that performance will always be worse than in Boot Camp. Hence my suggestion to use a Boot Camp partition and open it inside Mac OS with Parallels. When you need the full power, you'll be able to restart the computer.

Actually, it looks like Altium works properly in Parallels, http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/runnng-altium-under-parallels-on-a-macbook/

 

[eLabGuy]

I got my MBPR 15" last Oct 2014, I use Boot Camp to run Windows7 and installed Altium 14 on it. However, all the words, graphics look blurry in MBPR. I guess the MBPR 15" display resolution is too great to run Altium 14. Anyone has the same problem?