Hey All

I'm an Industrial Designer and as such need to use such programs as Pro Engineer and Solidworks. I am looking to buy a new computer and am tempted to get a Mac but I need to know if it will run the above applications as well as a PC if I use boot camp and install Win XP.

Anyone here done this and if so what kind of results have you got??

i use solid edge and rhino in bootcamp using xp and it works sweet!!

i use a Macbook Pro C2D 2.33ghz with 256mb of VRAM

solid edge here, imac 2.4ghz 1.5gb RAM & 256mb VRAM. Its pretty sweet. Rhino is coming to mac, there are some betas out and about. Once you start using OS X you'll hate spending time in solidedge since you'll have to deal with windows.

What graphics cards are you guys running? The ATI's? The new MBP's have the Nvida cards which I hear are pretty good for 3D applications??

definatley keen to hear what one should be using instead of autocad if you guys wanna suggest... running windows and bootcamp or parallels seems pointless and i dont want to do that or i wouldnt have brought a mac

Please keep this on topic.

Considering the two software applications I am using are only available on Windows I am interested to hear from people that are using boot camp or similar on a Mac and what their results have been as per the above posts.

CAD applications are usually fussy about graphics cards and the likes so I am really keen to hear of people using the above applications successfully on a mac as I would prefer to purchase a new Mac instead of a PC.

Autocad is not used much in the industry I work in so I can't be of much assistance there.

I've used Solidworks in Parallels running XP on a Core Duo Macbook 2Ghz (w/ 2GB RAM). It was usable, but it wasn't great. I'm about to try out the same setup (Solidworks in Parallels) on a Mac Pro 2.8Ghz w/ 8800GT GPU - I'll report back here when I've tested it out.

Thanks Forgie. I'd be interested to see how it runs using boot camp as well.

Solid Edge and Rhino work perfect...

Rhino is pretty intensive when rendering in 3D with textures and my Macbook Pro passes with flying colours. I have 5 other people who use MBPs using Bootcamp to use Solid Edge and Rhino.

Can use Vectorworks or for a lot more money and you are designing high rise buildings with 20 people working on them Archicad.

Vectorworks is pretty easy to use and its been around for over 20 years on the mac.

Both are professional programs though. ie cost a lot

ArchiCAD is brilliant - just got back from a meeting where we were looking at some great elevations done in it.. it even makes tilt-slab sheds look good!

I'm also an Industrial Designer and I have been running AutoCAD on a MacBook Pro running Tiger and XP using Parallels for about a year now. I find a tiny bit of lag in the screen refreshing but it is certainly a much better option than being stuck on Windows or using two machines as I had to before getting an intel mac.

I'm just about to take delivery of a new MBP with 4GB ram and the 512MB graphics card so it will be interesting to see how much of a difference it makes.

Innocenti, I am looking at a new MBP so I'd be super keen to hear your results.

innocenti im keen as well