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rMBP on Windows?

L

LC155

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 10, 2012
28
0
Hey guys,

I currently run Win 7 on a desktop (Don't really like 8) and have been eyeing up the Haswell rMBP for a while now. Well, now that they're out, and the cMBP is gone, I'm going to have to come to terms with something - does Windows actually look any good on a retina resolution?

I would primarily like to run windows 7, but I heard 8.1 actually supports retina like resolutions now, but has anyone compared the two? This is the only thing stopping me from making a direct purchase, as I know I'll be using windows most of the time I am using the machine.

Auxiliary question: If I get the 15" with the dGPU, will windows use that over the integrated one all the time? (which I presume would mean less battery)

Thanks
 
Imo you could get Windows 7 to appear reasonably on a rMBP with some fiddling. It does look better with Windows 8.1 though as standard.
 
That'll probably kill those battery life savings, then.

Perhaps I'd be better off without it then. I have a fully kitted out gaming PC, so I wouldn't be playing nay intensive games on it anyway. :p
 
Hey again,

I read up some more on parallels, and it seems that it offers all the benefits of bootcamp (with only a slight performance hit), but since it is just a VM of Windows in the mac OS, you keep the GPU switching, and battery life is better.

Is the only caveat of parallels compared to bootcamp the slight performance hit? Because if so, that'll be the route I'll go for sure - means I get the dGPU for better resale value later, without it always being on in windows and killing my battery.
 
LC155 said:
Hey again,

I read up some more on parallels, and it seems that it offers all the benefits of bootcamp (with only a slight performance hit), but since it is just a VM of Windows in the mac OS, you keep the GPU switching, and battery life is better.

Is the only caveat of parallels compared to bootcamp the slight performance hit? Because if so, that'll be the route I'll go for sure - means I get the dGPU for better resale value later, without it always being on in windows and killing my battery.
Click to expand...

I am new to Mac and haven't even gotten mine yet, so take this with a grain of salt....

As far as I know the only performance hit is it will use more ram. I have been trying to research this stuff over the last week, but I don't have a solid answer for you.
 
You'll never get full native performance, it depends what you need to do and how demanding the application is. If it is just Office fine, if it is gaming then no unless you don't mind a real loss of performance (which is fatal with this spec).
 
LC155 said:
Is the only caveat of parallels compared to bootcamp the slight performance hit? Because if so, that'll be the route I'll go for sure - means I get the dGPU for better resale value later, without it always being on in windows and killing my battery.
Click to expand...

Your running 2 OS'es at once, so yeah there's a performance hit.

If you intend to use graphically intensive apps, Parallels and VMWare virtualize a rather crappy GPU, and that's likely where you'll see the most impact.
 
Yeah, I figured.

Although apparently it still uses less battery life than running windows natively, so that's kinda funny. :p

I don't think I'll ever be taxing the GPU massively - the most I'd probably play on the VM is something like Terraria or some other low power game.
 
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