Apple Boot Camp (beta)

A quick scan of the Device Manager showed that we were a few drivers short of a full deck. We installed the contents of the driver disc that Boot Camp had us create, which filled in most, but not all, of the gaps. We were still missing a USB driver and a PCI driver, along with some unknowns. From our first pass with Windows on the iMac, however, the system appeared to be fully operational. We were able to connect to our LAN and the Internet, and even play a game of Minesweeper.

What Boot Camp doesn't let you do is run both operating systems at the same time: you must shut down one before booting to the other. Whichever OS you had running last will boot upon the next start-up. To prevent that from happening, simply hold down the Alt-Option key while the system powers on, and after a few seconds, you'll be presented with a grey start screen with two images of hard drives: choose the one on the left for Mac OS or the right-hand one for Windows.

Boot Camp also installs an icon labelled Startup Disk in the Control Panel in Windows and in the System Preferences window in Mac OS. This opens a window that lists the Mac OS and Windows XP partitions. Choose one to shut down the current OS you have running and boot to the other. Switching between the two operating systems proved fast and easy. Also, Windows appeared to be stable; it crashed only once when we were investigating DirectX settings -- not an unusual occurrence on any Windows-based system.

There's more to this than playing Minesweeper on a Mac, of course. Aside from the 'wow' factor, Boot Camp -- especially when it becomes a standard feature of the Mac OS -- should usher in a new era for the Mac platform. Although you'll need to buy a copy of Windows, your Mac will be able to run any software that its PC competitors can run, not to mention all the Apple programs that PCs can't run.

Performance tests
Surprising as the Boot Camp development might be, the performance results are decidedly unremarkable. Given the Intel processor and motherboard, the iMac Core Duo's performance when running Windows was pretty much where we expected compared to other Windows PCs'. On our Photoshop CS test, it trailed dual-core PCs from Dell and HP, but only by a small percentage. We didn't expect it to top either of these systems, given their more powerful Pentium D 900-series desktop processors. Compared to the same iMac Core Duo system running Mac OS X, the system showed a large but not unexpected jump in performance with Photoshop. Where the iMac Core Duo in Mac OS X took 6.5 minutes to complete the test, because it must use the Rosetta translation software, the same system running Windows XP Pro took less than 3 minutes.

Nor are we shocked by the iTunes, video-encoding and Doom 3 tests. As it was written with the Mac OS X in mind, iTunes has historically run slower on Windows PCs. The same holds true for the iMac hardware running Windows: the Windows partition on the iMac took 26 seconds longer to finish our test. Our Sorenson video-encoding test looks much better on the Windows partition than on the OS X side for the same reason that the Photoshop results skewed in favour of Windows: Sorenson runs natively under Windows XP and is emulated via Rosetta under OS X.

For those who are interested in such matters, the release of Boot Camp doesn't change our opinion of the iMac as a gaming system. No matter which OS you run, its weak ATI Radeon X1600 graphics chip, which shares memory with the system itself, isn't going to deliver high frame rates. The iMac Core Duo performed better under Windows than under OS X (25.9 frames per second versus an even less playable 16.2), but we still don't recommend it for serious 3D gaming.

System configurations

Apple iMac Core Duo (Mac OS X)
Macintosh OS 10.4.4; 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo; 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 128MB ATI Radeon X1600 PCIe; 250GB Maxtor 7,200rpm Serial ATA hard drive

Apple iMac Core Duo (Windows XP Pro)
Windows XP Pro SP2; 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo; 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 128MB ATI Radeon X1600 PCIe; 250GB Maxtor 7,200rpm Serial ATA hard drive

Apple iMac G5 2.10GHz
Macintosh OS 10.4; PowerPC G5 2.10GHz; 512MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 128MB ATI Radeon X600XT PCIe; 250GB Serial ATA hard drive

Dell XPS 400 (Viiv)
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005; 3.2GHz Intel Pentium D 940; Intel 945P chipset; 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 533MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6800 (PCIe); two Maxtor 250GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA; integrated Intel (RAID 1)

HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005; 2.8GHz Intel Pentium D 920; Intel 945G chipset; 2,048MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6200 SE (PCIe); Maxtor 300GB 7,200rpm Serial ATA