We used Fusion 4.1.3, Fusion 5.0.1, Parallels 7, Parallels 8.797180 (we have to talk to Parallels about a simpler versioning scheme), and VirtualBox 4.2 to virtualize Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.Īll virtual machines were stored on and accessed from an external Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt RAID array with four 3 TB 7200 rpm hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration. Our tests were performed on a 2011 27-inch iMac at 3.4 GHz with 16 GB of RAM, running OS X 10.8.1. Read on for the ultimate performance comparison between Parallels 7, Parallels 8, Fusion 4, Fusion 5, Virtual Box, and Boot Camp. We’ve spent a few days testing and we now have our results. Readers were also curious about native Windows performance in Boot Camp. Many readers asked us to perform additional testing to determine the improvements between Parallels 7 and 8, and how the free VirtualBox software compared to the paid options.

A head-to-head comparison showed that Parallels 8 beat Fusion 5 overall, although performance was very close in most benchmarks. A few weeks ago, we provided a look at the major options for Windows virtualization on Mac OS X: Parallels Desktop 8 and VMware Fusion 5.

Parallels versus fusion