Check this product out. I haven't tested it out myself with Revit; but a
friend of mine tested it out with ADT 2006 and Advanced Steel and he said it
worked better than on the PC..
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/
Here is some of what he said to me.
Our old home computer needed upgrading and like you I have been eyeing the
Mac for a while especially since the move to Intel. So I took the plunge and
bought a Mac instead of a PC, I went for a 20" IMAC with 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo
and 2GB of ram. It was mostly for the wife and kids to use but I couldn't
keep my hands of it and I can tell you if you ever use a Mac for a few hours
you will be totally converted. The OS is beautiful everything is very slick
and pretty, it is so stable absolutely rock solid I used it to transcode
some video running it with the processors absolutely maxed out for hours and
it never missed a beat. When you install an application you just drag its
folder into the applications folder and that's it no installer no dll's no
registry it's all self contained and to uninstall you just drag it to the
trash.
So I just fell in love, it makes windows look like total crap. I was always
sceptical of all the Mac fan boys but they were right all along it is light
years ahead of windows and Linux.
So it got me thinking I have to switch my work stuff over to Mac I can't
bear to go back to windows but as you know AutoCAD doesn't run on Mac and I
thought bootcamp would be a hassle because you would need to reboot every
time you wanted to switch. I had heard about Parallels which is a virtual
machine that runs on the Mac and lets you install windows into the virtual
machine, a computer inside a computer if you will. It lets you run a full
version of XP right inside a window on the Mac. It's exactly the same as
running XP on any computer it even boots all inside the window. Well my
experience of virtual machines in the past was they were dog slow but I had
heard on an Intel Mac it was pretty decent.
So I decided to give it a go and downloaded a trial of Parallels
www.parallels.com from there site installed it and then set up the VM and
took my XP disc and installed a copy of XP. When I booted XP it ran at full
native speed it was total as responsive as my workstation. Now remember this
is inside an ordinary window in the Mac so you can just minimise it and go
right ahead and do everything on the Mac as normal.
So then that got me thinking what about ADT but then I thought surely not it's
a virtual machine it is emulating a video card so the 3D graphics are all
being processed by the CPU's so its going to be really slow to redraw the
screen when you rotate a model. I decided to give it a try anyway so I
installed ADT 2006 and my Advance Steel and it works perfectly the redraws
are faster on the Mac than on my workstation. I can pan and rotate in shaded
model no problem and I'm talking about 200 ton buildings with thousands of
plates, clip angles, bolts, welds etc. It confirms what I always thought
that ADT is not hard on the graphics card. The Mac which is doing all the
processing on the CPU's because the graphics card is only emulated is
handling the rotations just as well as my workstation which has an NVIDIA
Workstation grade 256mb graphics card.
So then I decided to see what the speed of drawing generation in Advance
Steel was like so I took a 200 ton job selected the whole job and generated
the shop drawings all 300 of them. The Mac did it in 17 minutes and my
workstation took 20 minutes.
So I'm totally sold my workstation is up for renewal in January and I'm
moving to Mac. I thought you might be interested in the info.
--
From;
Edward Borg
Precision Drafting LLC
Http://Precisiondraftingllc.com
