What's the best Mac for my needs?

[loss4words]

Hi guys,

I'm sure this is asked a lot but I thought I'd give it a try. I own a Macbook which I bought sometime in November last year. It's works great but it takes a big performance hit when I'm running Parallels or several memory hungry applications at once. But now the time has come where I'm in a market for a new computer and I am looking into a series of iMacs available right now.

What is the best iMac I could buy at the moment that won't slow down my computer if I wanted to run multiple instances of Parallels for example? Obviously money is always an issue but performance is really important to me.

Thanks for your help!

 

[MacMini2009]

24in iMac 2.93Ghz for $1799 should be fine for your needs.

If you dont have the money, just get the 20in or 24in with the 9400M.

 

[Dreamail]

Neither iMac

I don't think any iMac is up to the task of running several Parallels virtual machines at once.
They use the same CPUs as the MacBooks and wouldn't really improve your situation much.

In the tests I've seen where people run Parallels on a dual-core MacBook things get rally slow and choppy if Parallels uses both cores at the same time.

I guess you'd be fine if you would suspend all VMs except one and only run them one at a time, but if you have several running at the same time, I don't think you'd be happy with a dual-core CPU.

A low-end quad-core Mac Pro (or refurb Mac Pro) would be your best bet IMHO.