OS Neutral Does VMware fusion cut specs in half + other questions

[feldman26]

Does vmware fusion cut specs in half? Also are there any good utilities that can keep your laptop cooler when gaming?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

It depends on what settings you set, for example if you have a quad core CPU and 16 GB of RAM, you can set the virtual machine to use two of those cores and a maximum of 8 GB of RAM (maybe newer versions can do more).

I include some screenshots of the settings and the RAM and CPU usage.

Settings in VMWare Fusion for a Windows 7 Virtual Machine (VM):

RAM and CPU usage while the Windows 7 VM is not running:

RAM and CPU usage while the Windows 7 VM is running, but idle:

RAM and CPU usage while the Windows 7 VM is transcoding a video file via HandBrake:

RAM and CPU usage when VMWare Fusion is not running (the application is quit, but some VMWare Fusion helper processes are still running in the background):

The specs of my computer:

I hope this can shed some light?

As for cooling the notebook during high CPU usage, Mac OS X takes care of that.
If you want, you could try SMC Fan Control to manually set the fan or fans, or you could use an external cooling pad.

Those Macs in their heat - a sine of over-heating? - a short story by Mister GGJstudios