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bootcamp on 2020 Air
- Thread starter Dhonk
- Start date
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Hey man,
I was in the same boat as you and for the week I had my i5 I ran bootcamp about fifty percent of the time. Not enough to properly tweak the OS to make up for Apple's bad drivers, but enough to get to know it.
Pros:
- The new chip's burst clock seems to really agree with windows 10. Running bootcamp on my 2019, there's often mouse lag when opening a program or doing something CPU intensive. Not the case with the 2020 i5.
- Thermals and cooling are actually better in Windows 10 than they are on Catalina. When running demanding programs, it takes longer for the CPU to get hot, and it's faster to cool down. I have no idea why.
- It was able to tackle all my work-necessary programs with ease, and the switch between OSes is as easy as ever.
- Ran Chromium based browsers in a much more efficient, faster way. By that I mean it didn't heat the computer up as much as running them in Mac OS, I was able to watch YouTube videos without the fans kicking in, there was no lag minimising and maximising elements within a page, etc. Noticeable, everyday things - I'm not a benchmarker/I've never watched a 4K video on a non-4K screen, so I can't speak to that artificial stuff.
- The only gaming I do is on Windows, Civilization 5 (a game that's nearing ten years old), very rarely. 2019 and 2020, gaming on Windows and MacOS caused the fans to spin at 8000rpm which makes sense, but Civ 5 performed way better on the i5. I was able to run the graphics on Medium instead of Low, and there were no frame drops like I get on the 2019 MBA.
The only other game I tested was a new release of a series I love called Mount and Blade - Bannerlord. On the 2019 it took about half an hour to load and was 4-5 fps, on the 2020 it loaded within five minutes and was about 12-15 FPS. Still not playable (I knew that'd probably be the case, I just wanted to see what the difference would be). Still, if you're someone who likes playing games like CSGO, Rainbow Six Siege or LoL/DOTA type games, I imagine the i5 would be able to handle 60fps on these at medium settings pretty easily.
Cons:
- I lost about an hour of battery on Windows compared to Catalina (we all know the story - Apple has no incentive to make the windows experience as good as the MacOS one, so the drivers are poorly optimised).
- Compared to the 2019 MBA on Windows, the colour reproduction on the screen is weird. I don't know the technical terms but the 2020 running Windows looks washed out compared to Catalina. Not an issue on the 2019.
- Weird bug with the backlit keyboard. I normally turn it off and keep it off, but no matter what I did it would turn itself on at different times at different brightness levels. Disabled every relevant windows setting and bootcamp assistant check box, still happened. Not so much as a con as it is weird.
Let me know if I've missed everything but the Windows 10 experience was pretty good - I think the OS is getting better and better and it was a pleasure to run it on my 2020 i5. My main complaint would be battery life, but that was my main complaint with the entire machine - 5-6 hours down from 6-7 isn't too bad of a drop off when most Macs have their battery lives halved in Windows.
Peace!
I was in the same boat as you and for the week I had my i5 I ran bootcamp about fifty percent of the time. Not enough to properly tweak the OS to make up for Apple's bad drivers, but enough to get to know it.
Pros:
- The new chip's burst clock seems to really agree with windows 10. Running bootcamp on my 2019, there's often mouse lag when opening a program or doing something CPU intensive. Not the case with the 2020 i5.
- Thermals and cooling are actually better in Windows 10 than they are on Catalina. When running demanding programs, it takes longer for the CPU to get hot, and it's faster to cool down. I have no idea why.
- It was able to tackle all my work-necessary programs with ease, and the switch between OSes is as easy as ever.
- Ran Chromium based browsers in a much more efficient, faster way. By that I mean it didn't heat the computer up as much as running them in Mac OS, I was able to watch YouTube videos without the fans kicking in, there was no lag minimising and maximising elements within a page, etc. Noticeable, everyday things - I'm not a benchmarker/I've never watched a 4K video on a non-4K screen, so I can't speak to that artificial stuff.
- The only gaming I do is on Windows, Civilization 5 (a game that's nearing ten years old), very rarely. 2019 and 2020, gaming on Windows and MacOS caused the fans to spin at 8000rpm which makes sense, but Civ 5 performed way better on the i5. I was able to run the graphics on Medium instead of Low, and there were no frame drops like I get on the 2019 MBA.
The only other game I tested was a new release of a series I love called Mount and Blade - Bannerlord. On the 2019 it took about half an hour to load and was 4-5 fps, on the 2020 it loaded within five minutes and was about 12-15 FPS. Still not playable (I knew that'd probably be the case, I just wanted to see what the difference would be). Still, if you're someone who likes playing games like CSGO, Rainbow Six Siege or LoL/DOTA type games, I imagine the i5 would be able to handle 60fps on these at medium settings pretty easily.
Cons:
- I lost about an hour of battery on Windows compared to Catalina (we all know the story - Apple has no incentive to make the windows experience as good as the MacOS one, so the drivers are poorly optimised).
- Compared to the 2019 MBA on Windows, the colour reproduction on the screen is weird. I don't know the technical terms but the 2020 running Windows looks washed out compared to Catalina. Not an issue on the 2019.
- Weird bug with the backlit keyboard. I normally turn it off and keep it off, but no matter what I did it would turn itself on at different times at different brightness levels. Disabled every relevant windows setting and bootcamp assistant check box, still happened. Not so much as a con as it is weird.
Let me know if I've missed everything but the Windows 10 experience was pretty good - I think the OS is getting better and better and it was a pleasure to run it on my 2020 i5. My main complaint would be battery life, but that was my main complaint with the entire machine - 5-6 hours down from 6-7 isn't too bad of a drop off when most Macs have their battery lives halved in Windows.
Peace!
Last edited:
Hi,
not sure if it's just my machine but throttling is way more aggressive for me than under MacOS:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ly-cs-go-bootcamp-other-tests-inside.2231950/
not sure if it's just my machine but throttling is way more aggressive for me than under MacOS:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ly-cs-go-bootcamp-other-tests-inside.2231950/