Mac Pro Windows Experience Index
Posted Feb 3, 2007 at 01:55 PM
I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my Mac Pro at home this morning, and ran into a bit of a snafu as soon as the installation was completed. My video card (an NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT with 256MB of RAM), combined with having only 1GB of RAM in the computer, meant that the best video I could get was 4 colors at 800×600 resolution. This was not the result that I had hoped for, so I had three choices: wait for the final release of Boot Camp and updated drivers and hope for better support; get more RAM; or replace the video card.
When I bought the machine in December, I knew I’d be upgrading the RAM very soon and upgrading the video card eventually, I just didn’t expect to do so this quickly. I knew I could use the RAM, especially since I’ll be doing development within Vista, so a quick trip out to get an additional 2GB of RAM was all it took to resolve the problem and proceed.
How my Mac Pro scores
With the added RAM, my Mac Pro gets a Windows Experience Index base score of 4.3 — most of the components score over 5.0, it’s the video card that’s bringing the base score down:
| Component | What is rated | Sub-score |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Calculations per second | 5.9 |
| Memory (RAM) | Memory operations per second | 5.9 |
| Graphics | Desktop performance for Windows Aero | 4.3 |
| Gaming graphics | 3D business gaming and graphics performance | 4.4 |
| Primary hard disk | Disk data transfer rate | 5.4 |
Aero glass is fully supported, so until such time that I need to upgrade to run some high-end game or other graphics-intensive application, I’m very pleased with my current setup — certainly one which should satisfy my needs for quite some time.
I have a 250MB primary hard drive, which I partitioned with the Boot Camp beta into two equal partitions: one for OS X and one for Vista. Even with Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 Professional installed on top of Windows Vista Ultimate, I’ve still got plenty of room to grow, in terms of applications, which is nice. I keep my data on separate drives — currently three 500GB Western Digital drives striped into one large volume for my music, pictures and other documents.
I’ve still got a few unresolved issues — the same ones I mentioned that are occurring on my MacBook, but it’s nothing I can’t live without until the final version of Boot Camp is released with updated drivers. Perhaps they’ll even appear in Windows Update before then, which would be a nice, if unexpected, surprise.
About this page
This page contains a single post from Daniel Boerner's blog, of which Boot Camp + Windows Vista = no more Airport Extreme reboots is the latest post.
Are there more posts like this one?
Possibly. Within this blog, this post is categorized under apple and microsoft and it was posted on February 3, 2007. Those would be good places to start looking for related posts.
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