Fastest Windows on Mac

[askywalker]

I will be in a 'temporary' location in Asia for a year. I have a Santa Rosa MBP 15" - it is starting to get a little too slow to do my primary computing.

I need to do fairly heavy computing - mostly large Visual Studio projects. I am concerned that the new MBP is still not quite enough computer to do this really well, and is quite expensive on the top end stuff.

How much more computer do I get in the iMac? I see I can get it for about $1900 (after YEN conversion), and it has i5 or i7 processor. This seems to be a lot better than the top end MBP. For business computing (I am not a gamer), are there comparisons of the performance of the Mac's (MBP/iMAC/MacPro).

Any other programmers using a MBP with huge projects? Is it silky smooth or do I need to go to a MacPro or iMac?

btw - the reason I am focused on Apple is cause I love the MBP that I got 'stuck' buying a few years ago while in Asia. The Apple global support and warranty is amazing. I usually use custom built systems for my desktop - but don't have the confidence to do this in Asia.

 

[flopticalcube]

Primatelabs does a full comparison of all Macs past and present using geekbench so its an excellent CPU score.

 

[askywalker]

Primatelabs does a full comparison of all Macs past and present using geekbench so its an excellent CPU score.

Great -thanks!

I see my current MBP's cpu got a 3082. This seems to be a good CPU comparison - so I suppose I can find the currently selling iMac vs MBP, and that will give me an idea of how much better an iMac would be. Don't notebooks also have slower memory/hard drives/video etc?

I just checked, current (late 2009?):
iMac - 8237
MBP - 4158
So there is a very, very big difference in CPU performance between the iMac and MBP. The improvement from 3 years ago (my 3082) to current (4158) is certainly not as big of a jump.

 

[flopticalcube]

Current iMacs use laptop memory and video cards and desktop processors and hard drives. Given that its fairly straight-forward to install and SSD drive in the laptop, I would not say that the HD is a big advantage in the desktop anymore. If you are not absolutely wedded to a Mac, there are many better performing laptops for Windows but that does come at the expense of battery life. Furthermore, if you need the portability, an iMac would not be the best choice.