Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

RMBP config

M

macran

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 11, 2013
31
0
How good go you think is this configuration for day to day usage and a couple of VM's VMware fusion mostly and want to do windows parallels and i am not sure if this config would be enough.I am a first time mac user.:apple:please advise

2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz
16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
256GB Flash Storage
 
Great, just perhaps not enough GB for the SSD. If you partition 100 GB for the VM, you only have 150 left for OSX. I recommend getting at least 512 if you plan on running VMs.
 
macran said:
How good go you think is this configuration for day to day usage and a couple of VM's VMware fusion mostly and want to do windows parallels and i am not sure if this config would be enough.I am a first time mac user.:apple:please advise

2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz
16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
256GB Flash Storage
Click to expand...

Since VM's mainly rely on a good amount of RAM, I would say the 16GB is the most important part of the spec. All the processors on the last few generation MBP's are easily good enough to handle multiple VM's.

Good luck
 
How about having the VM's on external HD. I have a 1TB Western digital passport hard drive.Does putting the VM's on the external hard drive slows down the performance ,how significantly it differers running VM locally or on an external Hard drive?

Thanks a lot for your advises.I appreciate it
 
macran said:
How about having the VM's on external HD. I have a 1TB Western digital passport hard drive.Does putting the VM's on the external hard drive slows down the performance ,how significantly it differers running VM locally or on an external Hard drive?

Thanks a lot for your advises.I appreciate it
Click to expand...

5400 RPM HDD vs SSD? Significant performance drop. Should not be too bad though...
 
You could probably bump the processor down to the 2.4ghz one. I'd take 2.4/16/512 over 2.7/16/256 any day of the week unless possibly I was rendering video.
 
I would suggest you check out the OWC upgrade. When I did the maths a few months ago, you could get the 256GB Apple SSD, AND the 480GB OWC SSD (which is supposed to be slightly faster), AND an external USB3 case for the original Apple SSD all for basically the same cost as upgrading to the 512GB SSD from Apple.

The 2.7GHz upgrade is less important than RAM or SSD space in pretty much all scenarios.
 
FYI ... 1 vCPU in a VM uses up one core on the pCPU. Although the CPU scheduling has gotten lots better in the past few years, it's still important to be aware that when you have a VM with multiple vCPU in it, the VM will suffer a performance hit if the number of vCPU in it is equal to or greater than the total number of cores available on pCPU.

Best practice is to try to limit the number of vCPU's in a VM to something less than the number of cores in the pCPU. Nothing is going to stop you from going beyond that, you will just not be running your VM(s) (and host) at its most optimal.

With that in mind, I usually recommend that for people that will be running a multi-vCPU VM, or more than one VM on a laptop, that they go with a quad-core CPU in that laptop, which puts you into 15" MBP territory. Stay away from the dual-core CPU's.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back