It work . Impressively well . With games , even . you may see our elaborated trial results below , but that’sPC World ’s first impression of Windows XP hightail it under Apple ’s Boot Camp on our 20 - column inch iMac . And that ’s more than you could say a couple of sidereal day ago about the forebode - but - hacked - togetherWinXPonMaceffort .

Eager to get our hands on a real , dual - boot Apple / Windows crossbreed , we launch the Boot Camp installer on a 20 - column inch iMac and get the process astonishingly smooth . It hold about an minute . ( you could download Boot Camphere . ) Graphics drivers — the major remaining performance vault under WinXPonMac — were solid and reactive under limited examination on our iMac .

Booting with Boot Camp

Boot Camp demand the late version of Mac OS X ( OS X 10.4.6 ) and a microcode update ( a very forte , un - Mac - same system bleep is normal at the start of this process ) . Once you ’ve properly revise your system , you could download , install , and run Boot Camp Assistant , which burns a CD of Windows driver for you and walk you through the operation of repartitioning your Mac and installing Windows XP .

I chose to give XP a 100 GB partitioning and inserted my XP Service Pack 2 certificate of deposit to begin the installation process . XP ’s familiar , pixelated installation process went normally , and the Boot Camp manual provided intelligent counsel about how to recount XP which partition to use and how to initialize that partition . ( If you choose FAT instead of NTFS , you ’ll be able to save data file to the XP book while you ’re running Mac OS . )

On our iMac test machine , Boot Camp was endearingly smart about automating the series of demand reboots to get you set up in XP . Once XP was localize up to my expiation , I hold down the Option key while bring up and used the bootloader to hop back into OS X.

Once there , I used the Startup Disk druthers page that Boot Camp installs to secure that XP was set as the nonpayment OS . Boot Camp install a corresponding Control Panel app in Windows so you could interchange this place setting in either oculus sinister .

No hitches so far

So far , working in Windows on the Intel - base iMac has come off without a hitch : If not for the slicker - appear hardware , I᾿d think I was work on a standard Windows PC with a wide - screen monitor . And that ’s exactly what you ’d desire from a usable dual - boot organisation .

Firefox download and instal cleanly , and iTunes stream song well from other PCs on the internet . Both wired and wireless networking seemed all right . footling affair , like the eject key fruit on the Mac ’s keyboard , exploit without a hiccup . Even machinelike number one wood updates downloaded and instal easily .

All in all , Boot Camp looks like an telling sweat from Apple . Over the next few days , we ’ll cover to put our 20 - inch iMac / Windows loge through its paces and psychoanalyse how this new double - kick alternative could affect the PC mankind .

Performance ?

Back in Windows , I got right down to business and put in a few game to put the graphics and sound living to the test . The prompt and foul verdict on carrying out ? Most telling . Doom 3 and Far Cry both ran smoothly with high - end graphics options turned on .

In both cases , I had to tweak visual scope manually , since the game mechanically put themselves to very low configurations . Far Cry , for exercise , autodetected very low options , but it ran without a hitch when I bumped the solvent up to 1,280 - by-720 , with all visual quality choice set to “ High . ”

Our 20 - inch iMac get with a 2.0 - gigacycle per second Core Duo processor , 1 GB of RAM , and an ATI Radeon X1600 computer graphic card with 128 MB of GDDR3 memory . That ’s roughly tantamount to a gamey - end laptop machine , and anecdotally the performance I obtained was about what I ’d have expected from that case of PC .

The first artwork psychometric test resultant role are in for the 20 - column inch iMac , and Windows XP under Boot Camp continues to shanghai . In our Doom 3 and Far Cry bench mark , the iMac ran neck and neck with a pair of notebook organisation equip with Intel Core Duo processors and similar graphics computer hardware .

Here ’s a snap of the results in our tests without antialiasing .

PC World Boot Camp Graphics Tests

Best result inbold .

Results are frame per second . All test system featured 1 GB of RAM , except for the Acer TravelMate 8200 and the WinBook PowerSpec Extreme 9200 . Each system had its own nontextual matter card — iMac : Radeon X1600 with 128 M of RAM ; HP Compag nx9420 : ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256 Mbit of RAM ; Acer TravelMate 8200 : ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256 megabit of Aries ; WinBook PowerSpec Extreme 9200 : Nvidia GeForce 6600 with 256 MiB of tup ; CyberPower Media Center Ultra Edition : Nvidia GeForce 6600 with 256 MB of RAM.—Testing courtesy of PC World .